


The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch

by gayboy



Series: The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch [1]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Napoleonic Era RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depression, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:45:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 101,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8761012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayboy/pseuds/gayboy
Summary: Leo believed that asking someone the question, “Where are you from?” was inherently unfair, because whereas some people could simply answer “Quebec” or even “Canada”, he always felt the need to clarify that he was Corsican and spoke primarily Corsican, but he was from France, and lived in Quebec. In his mind, the true meaning of “Where are you from?” roughly translated into “Which place-name do you identify with and how can I factor it into my perception of you?”.And then, of course, there were people like Sasha.





	1. Impedimenta

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a play on The Sufferings of Young Werther.

                When Leo first moved to Quebec, a question he often received was, “Where are you from?”, to which he would reply, “France,” before moving on with his day. The more appropriate response would have been “Corsica”, but whenever he told anyone he was from Corsica, they would always ask him questions about the island as if he was a world atlas that had gained sentience. Yes, technically it was part of France, but it wasn't part of the hexagon. In any case, however, he thought that even as a Corsican, he had the right to say that he was French. He hadn’t been born or raised in France, and neither his accent nor his mother tongue were French, but he _felt_ French. In fact, Leo believed that asking someone the question, “Where are you from?” was inherently unfair, because whereas some people could simply answer “Quebec” or even “Canada”, he always felt the need to clarify that he was Corsican and spoke primarily Corsican, but he was _from_ France, and lived in Quebec. In his mind, the true meaning of “Where are you from?” roughly translated into “Which place-name do you identify with and how can I factor it into my perception of you?”.

                And then, of course, there were people like Sasha, Leo’s co-worker, who were lucky enough to speak relatively unaccented French and were rarely asked, “Where are you from?” by complete strangers. There was even a joke about it: a Corsica-born Frenchman and a coincidentally-French-speaking Russian running an American-owned coffee shop in Quebec. Leo didn’t think that the joke was very funny.

                Right now, however, his fuse was roughly two nanometers long, and he wasn’t having any of this political nonsense.

                ‘ _It’s 8 AM, Napoleon,’_ he thought, ‘ _just keep working. Nobody cares as much as you do.’_

                The scene was _La Republique_ , the coffee shop where Leo worked, at 8 AM in the morning, and some customer had noticed his accent and had asked him where he was from.

                “I’m from Italy,” he answered, just so he didn’t warrant a snarky comment about why his accent didn’t _sound_ French enough. The customer nodded before moving on to something else. After she had left, he turned to Sasha, who was nonchalantly leaning against a counter, and muttered, “Sasha, cover my shift, I have to get my things out of the apartment by the time Josephine gets home at ten.”

                “Oh,” Sasha sighed. Well, Leo _had_ told him beforehand. “Good luck.”

                “Thanks.”

                As Leo hung up his apron and walked out of the back door of _La Republique_ , he didn’t think about Sasha or the whole transnationalism debacle or the fact that he didn’t have the means to own anything nice anymore. He had packed everything he wanted to take into a single suitcase, leaving everything else in his (now Josephine’s) apartment. Since his name was on the apartment’s lease, he’d _technically_ be illegally subletting it to Josephine’s lover, Hippolyte, but he pretended that the inconvenience didn’t bother him too much. Leo couldn’t let either Josephine or Hippolyte know the extent at which he had been wounded.

                When he arrived at his apartment building, he didn’t spare any time to glance around the lobby or make conversation with any of the people there. Instead, he went directly for the fire escape and climbed the five sets of stairs without thinking about it. In contrast to the demeanor of the rest of the building, the fire escape was falling apart and badly in need of renovation. The paint had chipped off of the walls to the extent that most of the building’s concrete was exposed, and there were grooves worn into the stairs from where residents had stepped for years. Every time he walked through these stairs, Leo felt an inexplicable feeling of comfort; however, this time, the feeling of comfort was tinged with the knowledge that he would probably never see this place again.

                When he reached the fifth floor, he swung open the door and began to make his way to apartment 53. He would miss this place, aside from the fact that it was inextricably linked to Josephine in his mind. As he pulled his keys out of his pocket and began to unlock the door, to Leo’s surprise, someone opened it from the inside. He looked up.

                “Oh,” he said, trying to conceal any expressions which would have made their way into his voice. “You.”

                Hippolyte, now wanting to add insult to injury, didn’t say anything as he opened the door all the way. Leo merely grabbed his suitcase of things that he had left by the door. He didn’t care to look around one last time; he already knew what everything looked like well enough, and while he had previously fawned over Josephine’s interior design skills, now it just seemed as if there were too many roses everywhere. She loved roses, and Leo even felt tempted to compare her to a beautiful-but-thorny rose, but he knew that it was cliché.

                As he turned to leave, Hippolyte broke his oath of silence and asked, “Is that everything you own?” As if to answer, Leo turned around again and walked to the lamp in their living room area. In a concise motion, he unscrewed the bulb from the socket and took it with him. No more words were exchanged between the two before Napoleon left and closed the door behind him.

                As he walked back to and descended the fire escape again, his thoughts didn’t focus at all on Josephine or Hippolyte or his current misfortune. He thought about how he would have to get to the nearby bus stop, wait for twenty minutes before getting onto the correct route, and then navigate his way to his new place of residence, a room he was subletting in a co-op about twenty minutes away. He hadn’t seen the place yet, but hoped for the best.

\---

                When Leo arrived at the co-op, he was slightly dismayed at the state of disrepair of the exterior, as the shingles were practically falling off of the roof and the concrete leading up to the door of the house was completely cracked and uneven. Bearing a healthy amount of caution, he went inside. The first thing that he saw was a staircase in a hallway, and decided to go down the hallway instead. The place was perfumed in the smell of marijuana.

                ‘ _Okay,’_ he thought. ‘ _This isn’t too bad. I’ve lived in worse places.’_ The hallway, he discovered, led to the living room area, where two of the residents were lounging.

                “Hey,” one of them said, “are you the guy who’s subletting from, uh…”

                “Yes,” answered Leo, “would you happen to know where his room is?”

                “Upstairs, take a left, end of the hallway. I’m Giuseppina, by the way. Nice to meet you. I hope that you’re good at cooking,” she added as a joke. She then held out her hand to Leo, who was relieved in the reassurance that there would be at least one kind person here.

                Shaking her hand, Leo replied, “Leo. Nice to meet you.”

                “Are you from… Italy?”

                “Corsica.”

                A look of recognition passed over Giuseppina’s face as she registered the information. As there was nothing left for Leo to add to this interaction, he left the room and made his way up the intolerably creaky, grime-covered stairs. A couple of ants rushed out of a crevice in the staircase, and Leo tried to ignore them. He’d lived in worse places.

                The upstairs wasn’t nearly as bad as the downstairs, because the floor was actually clean and the walls were painted a pleasant shade of blue. There were even a couple of paintings- one of unicorns, another a copy of “Starry Night”. Leo didn’t particularly like Van Gogh, but at least someone had tried to beautify the place. Even the view from the windows wasn’t bad; they looked out onto half-barren treetops and a few establishments a couple of streets ahead. When he found the room that he was looking for, his arm was sore, and the owner of the room was there waiting for him.

                The room itself was somewhat small, as rooms in co-ops tend to be, but its advantage was that it didn’t carry the incorrigible scent of marijuana, and the view was pretty nice, too. There was a desk of plain wood and a bed which didn’t really look comfortable, but would have to do.

                “You’re my subletter,” the man remarked as Leo entered the room. He began to give him a run-down of the co-op, which lasted for about five minutes before he said, “I’m expecting you to pay rent on the twenty-fifth of every month. My lease ends in three months, so you’ve got three months. Good luck.” Leo hadn’t really listened except for the part where he was told that he was supposed to vacuum once a week and that he was to cook dinner alongside someone else on Wednesdays, but the “good luck” sounded genuine. Once he left, Leo put his suitcase on the desk and opened it. The only things he had thought of bringing with him were some blankets, three books, and some clothes. And, of course, there was the lightbulb that he had taken from Josephine’s apartment.

                ‘ _I should have brought something else,’_ he thought, but there was nothing else he could think of that was worth bringing. He had left some notebooks at Josephine’s apartment which may have been worth bringing, but they weren’t worth risking face. The three books consisted of a volume of Rousseau, a copy of the Iliad, and a journal. The former two had been gifts from his brother, Joseph, when he left France. Setting the tomes upright on the desk, Leo decided that he wasn’t _content_ with his life, but that a sense of satisfaction lingered from letting go of almost everything.

\---

                When Leo went to work the next morning at 6:30 AM, Sasha was already there, getting all of the various machines running. Although he was still tired from taking over both his and Leo’s shifts yesterday, at the same time, he felt enough sympathy for the other man that it overpowered his own sense of inconvenience.

                “Morning, Napoleon,” he said as Leo came in through the back door and carefully locked it behind him. “How’s it going?”

                “Can I be honest with you?” Leo asked, punching his time card to start his shift and putting on his apron.

Sasha nodded. “Of course.” Leo wasn’t the type of person who was liberal with complaints, so when he _did_ have one, he was inclined to listen.

“So yesterday, after I collected my things from Josephine’s apartment and left, I finally moved in to the co-op where I’m subletting, right?”

“You’re living in a co-op?” Sasha leaned back against the counter and took a sip of his coffee. “Aren’t co-ops notorious for drugs, though?”

“I like _my_ floor well enough, it’s just everything else.”        

“Such as?”

“Well,” sighed Leo, “in the one house, there live humans, two cats, a dog, ants, termites probably, and a mysterious creature in the basement that could be either a squirrel or a raccoon but maybe both. I actually went in the basement yesterday, too, but I left once I found some empty syringes on the ground.”            

Sasha shot Leo a look of disgust. “How long are you subletting this place for, again?”

“Three months,” Leo shrugged. “Until I can find a better place to live.”

“I’m sorry that all of this happened to you.”

Once again, Leo shrugged. “I’m afraid that I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

\---

                Sasha wasn’t sure how to feel about Leo’s entire demeanor, but he attributed this to the fact that he didn’t understand him at all, either. On one hand, there was the fact that he’d found out two weeks ago that his longtime girlfriend had been longtime cheating on him, but on the other hand, he didn’t seem upset by this fact at all. Of course, Sasha didn’t really want to be in the awkward position of trying to comfort his co-worker on such a personal issue, but he thought that Leo should have seemed more distraught. Even when he had told him about the entire situation, he didn’t present it in an emotional way at all. If Sasha recalled correctly, all that Leo had said to him about the matter was, “Yesterday I found out that Josephine cheated on me with some guy named Hippolyte. I broke up with her and I’m moving out in two weeks so I might have to ask you to cover one of my shifts. I hope that it isn’t too much of an inconvenience.” Less “I’m upset about this”, and more “here’s some information that it may be convenient for you to know”.

                In fact, as far back as Sasha could remember, his friend/co-worker had never been very emotional. He could be good-humored at times, such as about the quality of life at the co-op, but that fell more into the category of “being tolerable to other people”. More than anything, though, Sasha just wanted him to have a friend to whom he could be open about his emotions. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to _be_ that friend, but now that Josephine had left him, Leo didn’t really have anyone, or at least not in this country. And so, Sasha decided that he wanted to be more than just co-workers. He wanted to be _friends_.

                Two days after Leo had moved into the co-op, after their shifts ended, Sasha punched out and tried to act nonchalant. As he was pretending to be nonchalant, he focused too greatly on his actions and not enough to the table and refrigerator in the back of _La Republique_ , where he ended up running into the table and falling over. Luckily, Leo, who was punching out in the same room, rushed over to help him up.

                “Are you okay?” Leo asked, extending a hand to his fallen co-worker.

                Sasha brushed it off as if this were an everyday occurrence, even though he had stubbed his toe badly and was in great pain. “Yeah, yeah, no, I’m completely fine,” he said, making eye contact with Leo. This was the first time he had noticed that he had to physically look downwards to make eye contact with him, and thought, ‘ _I’m around this guy for about a third of my day every day and I never noticed how short he is. That’s got to be around eight inches.’_

                Ignoring his train of thought, he continued pretending to be nonchalant. “Do you want to hang out sometime?” he asked.

                Leo gave him a concerned look. “Are you okay?” he repeated, slightly taken aback by Sasha’s question.

                “Yes, I’m being completely serious.”

                “I usually don’t have any plans from eleven PM to three AM on weekdays… and most of the day on Sunday.”

                “Monday, then,” concluded Sasha. “By the park with the fountain that has three women on it.”

                “Okay? I’ll see you on Monday? At 6 AM and then again at 11 PM?” Leo reluctantly agreed. As he left to go home, he thought, ‘ _This is weird.’_

                When Leo left, Sasha thought to himself, ‘ _Well, Sasha, you ruined it. He hates you now.’_

\---

                When Sasha went home to _his_ apartment not far from _La Republique_ , the first thing he did was call his brother, Konstantin, in Russia. Although Sasha had inherited enough money that he could afford to spare most expenses, long-distance calls really were expensive, and he saved them for special occasions. The special occasion _today_ was that Sasha really, really wanted to talk to Kostya. He sat on one of the chairs in his kitchen, pulled his cell phone out of his satchel, and dialed Kostya’s phone number along with all of the numbers needed to dial a Russian number, and waited.

                Since Sasha had run some errands before coming home, he had arrived at 5 instead of the usual 2:30, and wondered if Kostya would even be awake because of the time difference. However, after about a minute of ringing, he picked up.

                “Kostya! What are you doing?” Sasha exclaimed into the phone in Russian. “Go to sleep!”

                “ _Hey!”_ Kostya exclaimed back. “ _You called me first. For what occasion did you call?”_

“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you.” Sasha put his phone on speaker mode, set it on his kitchen counter, and took a kettle out of the cabinet above his stove for making tea. He filled it with fresh, cold filtered water as he listened to Kolya say, “ _every time you call me and say that you just want to talk, you just talk about the Corsican guy whom you work with. You never actually want to talk tome. You just want to talk. You’re so…._ ”

                “Whatever you want to say, just say it.”

                “ _You’re so insincere.”_

                Sasha retrieved a cup and put fresh, fragrant tea leaves in it. He leaned back against the smooth granite counter. “Okay,” he said, “what have _you_ been up to, Kostya?”

                Kostya sighed loudly and hung up the phone. Sasha knew that this would happen; talking to his favorite brother always gave him a badly-needed reality check.

                For the rest of the time until his tea was ready, he dwelt on what Kostya had told him. Before, he’d been told things along the lines of “I don’t like talking to you”, but today’s insult had penetrated a little bit deeper than he had expected from Kostya. “You’re so insincere”, Sasha thought, wasn’t even an insult; it was a genuine criticism, which gave it more power. However, he had dealt and been dealt a fair number of insults by Kostya over their twenty-one years of brotherhood, so he took the comment with a grain of salt. Still, this _was_ the first time that he had gotten angry and hung up like that. And then again, Sasha had really only called Kostya not because he wanted to talk, but because he wanted a reality check.

\---

                When Leo returned to the co-op, the first person he met again was Giuseppina, who was chatting with some guy on the sofa in the living room.

                “Hey!” Giuseppina called as he entered the room. “Leo!” Leo went over to say hello to her, carefully examining the man sitting next to her. He seemed friendly enough, and if they were going to live under the same roof, then Leo had to be nice to him anyway. His shirt was stained with what looked like paint, and it didn’t look like a new stain, either. His hands, however, were immaculate. Upon closer examination of his face, Leo even considered him to be handsome.

                “Good afternoon, Giuseppina,” Leo said, and then extended his hand to the handsome paint guy. “Leo,” he introduced himself. “Leo Bonaparte.”

                The man took his hand and gave it a firm shake. “Antoine-Jean Gros. But you can call me Antoine.” He spoke with a steady voice and an even steadier accent.

                “Are you from France?” asked Leo. Immediately after he said this, he mentally kicked himself for popping the “Where are you from?” question.

                “Why, yes,” Antoine answered. “Are you from… Ita-?”

                Leo cut him off. “Corsica. Which part of France are you from?”

                “Paris. Do you speak Italian?”

                “ _Sì, Italiano è mia madrelingua_. What do you do?”

                “I’m an artist. What do _you_ do?”

                This system of interrogation went on from some time before Antoine asked Leo, “Why did you come to Quebec?”, and he was unsure how to answer. To his relief, however, Giuseppina interjected by elbowing Antoine and telling him, “You can’t just ask someone why they came to Quebec!” As Giuseppina began to tell him off for his question, Leo took the opportunity to disappear and flee up the stairs to his room, where he quickly took off his jacket, set it on the desk, and sighed deeply.

                ‘ _Finally,’_ he thought, ‘ _it’s over. The day is over.’_ Leaning against the door, he took a few deep breaths before picking up the small handheld mirror he had found abandoned on a dusty shelf and examining his own face. Although he didn’t particularly enjoy gazing at his own reflection, he found it necessary to self-evaluate once in a while. His face, although wearier and _pointier_ than before, looked essentially the same, but he only felt a sense of disgust when he looked at his awkward, long-ish, simultaneously sandy and ash-y hair. It was long enough that he could twirl a finger around it several times. Leo hadn’t gotten his hair professionally cut for years, but maybe it was finally time.

                ‘ _My appearance definitely needs to change. No wonder Josephine didn’t love me.’_ Another voice in his head said, ‘ _No, Napoleon, you need to cut your hair, but that’s definitely not the reason that Josephine didn’t love you.’ ‘Why, then?’ ‘I don’t know, but for some reason, you weren’t worth loving.’_ ‘ _It wasn’t my fault. I did nothing wrong.’ ‘You could have.’_

                Leo set the mirror back on the desk face-down, and felt his right eye start to water. He didn’t know why, but whenever he would cry, only one of his eyes would ever betray his external lack of emotion. He liked to think that it was a feat of self-control. It wasn’t.

                The practice of compartmentalization was a strenuous one, but with enough practice, Leo had managed to convince himself that Josephine didn’t exist in the same world as _La Republique_ , that he no longer existed in the same world as Josephine, and that he was the only chain link that connected all of these things together. To compartmentalize was to erase himself from all but one of these worlds, rotating in and out of the day. And it was relaxing, really, except for when he forced himself to sort through all of the information crammed into a single drawer. It was even okay to open the wrong drawer at the wrong time sometimes. It was only times like now, when he opened the right drawer at the right time, that being Napoleon Bonaparte became unbearable.


	2. Maladroit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sasha learns that not everyone named Leo actually likes Leo Tolstoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here you go

                When Leo woke up on Monday, the first thing he saw was the darkness which had overtaken his room at the co-op, and instantly went into a panic that it was Tuesday morning and that he had missed his engagement with Sasha. It wasn’t until he had turned on the light and was able to see the face of his watch that he found out that it was only 7 PM.

                “ _God…”_ he breathed a sigh of relief. When it came down to it, he couldn’t have explained to himself or to anyone else why he had told Sasha to meet him at 11 PM to 3 AM when he could have met him at more convenient hours. He supposed that it could have been a method of testing Sasha’s actual willingness to spent time with him, or it could have been his belief that the last hours of the night were the best hours to spend with other people. It wasn’t as if he would have used that time for sleep, anyway.

                Standing up from the chair where he had accidentally fallen asleep, he stood up and stretched his arms and legs out as far as he could. In addition, he ran his hands through his newly-shortened hair once or twice, relishing in the fact that, for the first time in his life, he felt wonderfully flamboyant. It had only taken twenty-nine years. In the end, he had decided to cut his own hair again, and, with a pair of safety scissors, cut off the length this afternoon. It was a cathartic feeling if he had ever felt one, and so he concluded that the change in his appearance was the first step to getting readjusted. That said, he still sulked over Josephine for a considerable portion of the day, not that he would ever tell anyone.

                The bright red pair of safety scissors still lay on his desk. Leo wondered why, of all days, today was the day that he had spontaneously fallen asleep. A gentle wind rattled the leaves off of the trees outside, so, putting on his long black coat and heading out. Although he probably didn’t _need_ such protection from the cold, the last thing he needed right now was to have to actively cater to his intolerance to the cold. Although the common perception was that April began the season of beginnings, Leo much preferred to see October as the beginning of the season of new beginnings. Autumn, after all, was nothing but the ceremonious end of summer, and summer, after all, was nothing but a celebration for having tolerated the other nine months. His birthday, the fifteenth of August, marked what _he_ saw as the end of summer. A sixth of the new year had already closed its doors.

                As he was descending the grimy stairs, he met Antoine going the other way. Antoine didn’t say anything directly about the change in his appearance, but said in passing, “Leo, you look good. You look considerably older than you used to.”

                Leo found this a strange comment, as Antoine essentially told him that he looked old, but took it as a compliment anyway. “Antoine, I’m not sure that that’s a good thing,” he replied. “I’m twenty-nine.”

                “Oh. Sorry.”

                Deciding to take the interaction with a grain of salt, he headed for the door of the co-op, turned the loose knob, and went outside. He never could prepare himself for the strife of going outside in the cold. It was only going to get colder until eleven, however, so he made the decision to forego complaining about the cold to himself for the next few hours. Unfortunately, no gloves were to be found in his pockets, and everything felt considerably colder with short hair. The only objects in his pockets were a worn leather wallet bearing a paltry sum, keys, and the light bulb from last Wednesday.

                It was funny, he thought, that in minorly inconveniencing Josephine and Hippolyte by taking one of their light bulbs, the light bulb now minorly inconvenienced him. Every time that he felt the crunch of a dead leaf underfoot, he thought about smashing the glass module on the ground, but couldn’t fathom doing it in real life; someone would eventually would eventually walk these streets barefoot, and Leo refused to have a stranger go to the emergency room because of an offhanded fit of passion. He thought of disposing of it at the closest bin, but when he fingered the smooth, cold glass surface, he wouldn’t allow himself to do that, either. The glass soon grew warm in his hand and he thought it would break under the pressure. It didn’t. Leo decidedly stopped thinking about Josephine, and let go of the bulb.

                It was only times like this, when he went out to clear his mind, that he put himself on autopilot. Noe paying attention to anything, neither knowing where he was going nor where he had been, he walked onward. Isolation was his cavalry, but a sense of dominance was his right hand, and in order to dominate others, Leo realized that first he had to exercise a mastery of the skill over himself.

\---

                It was 11:00 PM, and Sasha stood in the park with the fountain with the three women, waiting for Leo. Perhaps, Sasha feared, he wouldn’t come. After all, Leo always made a _point_ to be punctual. His fears, however, were multiplied when he saw a dark figure in a long coat emerge from the shadows of the streetlights.

                ‘ _This is it for Sasha,’_ he thought, reaching into his pocket, making a fist, and putting his keys in between his fingers. ‘ _The last words I heard from anyone in my family were, ‘_ you’re so insincere’. _I can’t die now_.’

                As the figure approached more closely, however, Sasha realized that it was only Leo. He still stood his ground, though, because it was _cold_ and he didn’t want to move more than he absolutely had to.

                “Sasha,” said Leo once he was within close enough range. “What are you doing here? Go home.”

                Sasha took a breath, but the cold air stung the inside of his nose, and he was forced to wait a few seconds to reply. “Your hair is different,” he noted, avoiding a flattering or insulting statement until there was better lighting. He couldn’t see much because it was dark and Leo wore a black coat, but he could see the pale skin of Leo’s wrists, as his hands were firmly lodged in his pockets. “Are your hands cold?” asked Sasha. “Do you need gloves? How long have you been outside?”

                “I’ve been outside for some time now, and thank you for offering, but no thank you.”

                “You can’t move or feel them, can you?”

                “My hands are fine,” Leo lied through his teeth, even though Sasha was right, and he could neither move nor feel them.

                “I insist. I have an extra pair of gloves.”

                “No.” For some reason Sasha couldn’t comprehend, Leo said “No” with such resounding, staunchly negative force that it shocked him. He didn’t mention the gloves again.

                “We can go inside?” he suggested instead. “I live only five minutes away.”

\---

                It had only taken thirty minutes for Sasha to convince Leo to come to his apartment, and when he reluctantly agreed, it was Sasha’s first personal victory over him. It was evident that Leo’s own show of weakness to the cold upset him, and insult was added to injury when he stepped into Sasha’s apartment building and gasped a quiet sigh of relief at the warm air.

                As they walked up the stairs, Sasha sighed, looked down at his small counterpart, and said, “Leo, you should make more of an active effort to not die of frostbite.”

                Leo, slightly annoyed by Sasha’s remark, replied, “This was the only time that I neglected to bring gloves.”

                When they reached his apartment, Leo didn’t even take a moment to look around before going to the nearest sink, turning it to the hottest setting with his elbow, and running the water over his frozen fingers. Again, he let out a gasp of relief, and only turned off the water when he felt that he had regained partial mobility of his extremities.

                Once again, Sasha reprimanded him, “You can succumb to serious nerve damage if you do that enough times.” Before Leo could open his mouth, he added, “Trust me, I grew up in Russia.”

                “Did you invite me to your apartment just to lecture me about not wearing gloves?” Leo dried his hands and finally taking a look around Sasha’s apartment. Even though the two were just in the kitchen, his simple-yet-elegant marble countertops and mahogany cabinets gave away that he had no problem with money. There were no pieces of IKEA furniture in sight.

                “No,” said Sasha, drumming his fingertips against the white countertop. “Would you… would you like some tea?”

                “Tea would be nice.” He wasn’t particularly in the mood for tea, but he wasn’t about to insult Sasha by declining his hospitality. “I never knew that you liked tea. I suppose that it’s to be expected, but I’ve only ever seen you drink coffee.”

                Sasha rummaged through his cabinets for a kettle. “Coffee-drinking is just a habit that I picked up after I moved here, and we _do_ work at a coffee shop, so it’s just more convenient.” Gesturing at the chairs and small table in the room, he added, “You know, you can sit down.”

                Leo carefully took off his coat and draped it over the back of the chair before sitting in it. “I went to boarding school in the north of France when I was a teenager,” he reminisced, “and some days, I would just eat a spoonful of instant coffee for breakfast.”

                “You can’t be serious.”

                “The last time I did that was twelve years ago when I was seventeen, and then I invested in a coffee mug.”

                At this, Sasha frowned. Twelve years ago, he was ten years old. “You’re twenty-nine?” he turned around.

                Slowly, Leo nodded. “Yes, Sasha, I’m twenty-nine.” It slightly amused him that he’d had to have the “I-get-it-I’m-old” conversation twice today, but at the same time, it saddened him. “I’ve been here since I was twenty-four.”

                Five years in Quebec was unthinkable to Sasha. “Why did you come?”

                “Some complications,” Leo brushed off the question. “Why did _you_ come to Quebec?”

                “I wanted to live abroad, and decided that Canada would be ideal because it’s bilingual. I don’t plan on living here forever, though... I want to move back to Russia someday.”

                “Yeah,” he agreed. “I thought that I was set to live here forever, but I have to find work in my actual field before I can do that…”

                “What do you do?” Sasha asked.

                “I have multiple degrees in mathematics and physics, but the lab I worked in closed its doors, which is why I’ve been at _La Republique_ for the last year or so.”

                "Oh." Sasha finally looked up, and turned to Leo. “The tea is done,” he said, pouring boiling water into two teacups filled with dark leaves. “Cream or sugar?” he asked.

                “No, thank you.”

                Carrying the cups over to the table, Sasha walked very slowly so that they wouldn’t spill. When he got settled down, Leo picked up his cup, cradling it in both hands, and stared deeply at the leaves wavering at the bottom. “I haven’t had tea in so long,” he mumbled.

                And Sasha decided, in a moment of hellish _longing_ for something more, decided that he was in love with Leo.

\---

                After that night, the late-night encounters at Sasha’s apartment became a regular thing, and Sasha realized that he didn’t really _need_ Kostya to ruin his self-confidence on a weekly basis. This realization not only saved him a hefty amount on his phone bill, but also took root in another realization: that sometimes it was _okay_ to be conceited, and as far as that went, he wasn’t concerned about overdoing it. For conceitedness, Leo definitely took the cake. Not that he would ever be _openly_ conceited, but after a while, Sasha noticed the subtle look in his eyes and the vague lines in his face which suggested that he thought very highly of himself. This, he thought, was quite ironic for someone applying for entry-level jobs at various labs. Not that he would ever admit it, of course, because Leo’s opinion of himself was the only reason he managed to wake up in the mornings.

                Really, the only thing that Sasha _really_ didn’t like about Leo was his adamant refusal to read Russian literature. After Sasha’s comment about the first names of Leo Bonaparte and Leo Tolstoy a few weeks ago, he had managed to convince Leo to read some of the greater works of Russian literature, beginning with Tolstoy, of course. Sasha couldn’t criticize Leo for not even trying- he had read _Anna Karenina_ first and quite enjoyed it- but for always putting the novels down halfway through; for, after _Anna Karenina_ , he had started _War and Peace_ , the quintessential Russian classic, but had never finished it. He never explained _why_ he hadn’t finished the book either, other than saying, “I don’t know why, but something about this novel makes me very uncomfortable.” It was a lie, of course, and Sasha _knew_ that it was a lie. Of _course_ he knew why, but was too disconcerted to say it for some reason.

                The same thing had happened a few days after Sasha had seen him carry an old, battered copy of _Crime and Punishment_ that he had checked out from the library. He had said the same thing again, that he didn’t know why, but something about the novel made him very uncomfortable. Okay then, said Sasha, how about poetry? Alexander Pushkin? Two days later, Leo reported that one of Pushkin’s poems had made him uncomfortable to the point of no return, and that was the end of his trying to read Russian literature.

                It was mid-November when Sasha met Klemens von Metternich. It was a Friday afternoon, and Sasha was completing his usual Friday rounds by cashing his paycheck, taking a walk, and finally stopping by his favorite locally-owned bakery for coffee and an ambiguously maple-flavored pastry. Although he didn’t particularly _like_ sweet food, it was completely worth the opportunity cost on Friday afternoons to relax, watch the people walk by on the street, and enjoy his coffee.

                Today, however, he was approached by a tall, handsome twenty-something year old, and didn’t know what to do except for to stare until the guy was in close enough distance to stay anything. He turned around and pretended to stare out of the window intensely. Noticing that the corner of the window was cracked and taped over, he wondered if it was even regulation when he felt a small tap on his shoulder. He turned around again, and _knew_ that the twenty-something guy was standing there.

                “Hi,” he said softly, before deciding that the shyness in his voice was emasculating and following up with a firmer “Hi”.

                “Hello,” the other guy said. Upon closer inspection of the guy, Sasha decided that he wasn’t particularly handsome because of his long, awkward nose, but his face had a nice angular shape and he had enough confidence and command over himself to make it _seem_ as if he _was_ attractive. In Sasha’s mind, it was as good as, if not better than, the actual thing.

                The guy continued, “Sorry if this is weird, but I was wondering if you’re the guy who works at La Republique? I pass by there on the way to work every morning, and I was wondering, because you look very familiar.” He spoke with an accent which sounded kind of German, but with a little bit of something else that Sasha couldn’t quite place.

                Not knowing what he had been expecting, Sasha blinked. “Yeah,” he nodded. “That _is_ me. At a rival bakery. Don’t tell anyone.” He pointed at the tall chair on the other side of the high table, and asked, “Do you want to sit down?”

                “Sure,” the other guy said, carefully setting his things on the table and draping his coat over the back of the chair before actually sitting down. “I’m Klemens, by the way.” They shook hands.

                “Sasha. Where are you from?” As soon as he said it, Sasha hated himself for popping the “where are you from” question, even though he didn’t share Leo's stinging distaste for it.

                Klemens looked to the side as if he were thinking about it before answering, “I’m not sure how to answer that question. I’m _technically_ from Austria, but I spent a long while in Germany, and the Netherlands as well. Mostly Austria, though. Are you from around here?”

                “I’m from Saint Petersburg.”

                “Russia! I don’t think I’ve met a Russian around here before. Why are you here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

                “I wanted to live abroad in a French-speaking country, but you know the French,” shrugged Sasha.

                “And the Swiss, and the Belgians…”

                “You get it. Why are _you_ here? In Quebec?”

                Klemens smiled. “I passed the bar exam in May, and I’ve been an intern at a law firm around here for the past five or six months.”

                “Why not intern in Austria or Germany?”

                “Too oversaturated, and to think of practicing law in a French-speaking European country...” he grimaced. “You know the French.”

                “You kind of remind me of someone I know,” commented Sasha, “in a good way, of course.” The frequency at which he thought about Leo almost annoyed him.

                “Really? Who would that be?”

                “I have a friend named Leo.”

                “Leo… Bonaparte?” Klemens frowned

                Taken aback, Sasha asked, “You know him?”

                “I know a girl called Giuseppina who lives in a co-op nearby, and mentioned something about a neighbor named Leo who worked in a coffee store, so it was rather a shot in the dark.”

                “Small world.” Their conversation continued for about half an hour more until Sasha took the sleeve off of his coffee cup, scrawled something on it, and handed it to Klemens. “This has been fun,” he said when the wind was finally letting up. “We should have coffee again sometime, and maybe with Leo and Giuseppina.”

                “Yeah, it would be…” Klemens squinted at whatever Sasha had written on the coffee sleeve, deducing that it was a phone number, but by the time he looked up again, Sasha was gone.

\---

                “You kind of remind me of a friend of mine,” Giuseppina remarked to Leo on Wednesday, seemingly out of the blue. The two were fulfilling their duties to the co-op by cooking a meal for the fifteen-or-so people who lived at the co-op.

                Stirring some liquid in a large pot, Leo replied, “Oh, really?” He wasn’t in a particularly chatty mood because he was _slightly_ put off that it was impossible to differentiate which of the food in the kitchen had been acquired through dumpster diving and which hadn’t, as well as the fact that he wasn’t a particularly great cook.

                “His name is Klemens von Metternich.” To Leo’s relief, Giuseppina didn’t seem to be a particularly great cook either; she appeared to be making some sort of Indian dish, and turmeric heavily stained her fingers. Brushing her hair off of her face, her fingers left the yellow powder on her hair and skin as well. She continued, “He’s a lawyer.”

                Leo looked over at her as he stirred some liquid in a pot. He smiled. “Your face has turmeric all over it.”  

                “What are you making? Potato soup? At least I know how to use spices.”

                “I know how to use spices,” he insisted.

                “I’ve never even seen you eat anything. How can you possibly know how to cook?”

                “Excuse me?” Leo pretended to be offended. “Before I moved into the co-op, I cooked for myself all the time.” This was somewhat true, although “all the time” was an overstatement between his lack of regularity with meals and hatred of anything requiring the usage of his hands. “Tell me more about this ‘Klemens’ guy.”

                “There’s nothing else to say. Something about his demeanor just reminds me of you. He has a strong jawline. Maybe that’s it.”

                “That’s the sweetest thing that anyone has ever said to me within the past four weeks. You think I have a strong jawline?” Tasting his soup a final time, he decided that it was done, took it off of the heat, and covered it.

                “You’re done?” asked Giuseppina. She took a cloth and futilely tried to wipe the turmeric off of her face.

                “People should start filtering in for dinner at around seven, and right now it’s six forty-five, and I’m not particularly hungry, so I’d say that I’m done here. I made enough soup for about eight people, so given that there’s fifteen who live here, it should suffice.”

                “I’m pretty sure that someone dumpstered the potatoes that you’re using.”

                “Well, then,” Leo sighed back, “I’m glad that I washed them four times before peeling them.” He seriously hated the dumpster-diving enthusiasm that kindled itself among the people of the co-op. Although the reality wasn’t that bad, the idea itself disgusted him. He made a mental note to _seriously_ begin apartment hunting within the week.

                “Where are you headed to?”

                “My co-worker has been trying to get me to read poetry by Alexander Pushkin, so the library, I suppose. Say,” he paused. “If you’re not doing anything tomorrow evening, will you show me around the neighborhood?” He had already seen the neighborhood, of course, but was just excited to have a platonic female friend.

                Giuseppina thought about it for a moment before agreeing. “Sure,” she agreed. “I only have to give a few voice lessons tomorrow morning, so it sounds alright.”

                “I’ll see you later, then.” Within a moment, Leo had left the cleanliness of the kitchen and entered the perpetual grime of the rest of the house. When he went to his room and put his coat on, the light bulb was still in his pocket. He glanced at the books on his table, the ones that his brother Joseph had given him., and the it hit him.

                ' _Giuseppe is the Italian form of ‘Joseph’, and Joseph was a major factor in the reason that I decided to leave Europe. Giuseppina is the Italian form of Josephine. Josephine! I can’t get too close to her. That name has come to haunt me.’_

                There was, he concluded, certainly more in a name than there ought to be. And, for that matter, it was almost unbearable to share a first name with Leo Tolstoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my love, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, arguably the most underrated figure in European history


	3. Leo's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

                Another month passed. It was mid-December, and coming up on Sasha’s twenty-third birthday. He had noticed long ago that there were two types of people when it came to the holiday season: there were people like him, who embraced it, and people who despised the holiday. Leo, however, didn’t fit into either category. More than anything, it seemed as if he didn’t even acknowledge that the holiday existed, but even so, he had seemed to be in a better mood lately. It could have been, Sasha concluded, a factor of things- there was the fact that it had been two months since he had last seen Josephine and that he was finally beginning to move on, there was the fact that he had been looking for housing other than the co-op for a while, and there was the fact that, despite his aversion to the cold, the trees outside powdered themselves with snow. These factors to happiness had slowly begun to reflect in the delicate lines around Leo’s mouth, producing a dreamy look in his otherwise hard eyes. Sasha was certain that he thought of Leo far, far more than Leo thought of him. As far as Sasha knew, there was nothing about him worth falling in love with, and there were too many things about Leo to prevent it.

                He thought that the best part of it was that Leo would never know anything he thought about him other than the fact that they had become good friends and that slowly, they had been gaining each other’s trust.

                As Leo punched out of his shift and Sasha waited patiently behind him, he couldn’t help but stare wide-eyed until Leo finally called him out on it.

                “Are you staring at me?” he demanded as he turned around, stepping aside to allow Sasha to punch himself out as well. It took Sasha three seconds to understand that Leo was talking to him, and another three to respond.

                “No, sorry, I was just…” He took his card quickly, avoiding eye contact.

                “You’ve been staring at me all day, and it’s been bothering me. Do I have ink on my face?”

                Sasha blushed. “No! You don’t have ink on your face.” He decided to be candid. “It’s because you have a different demeanor today.”

                “Do I?” Leo’s voice could either be soft and mild or harsh and grating depending on the day, but today, it had chosen to be soft.

                “In a good way, of course. You seem, I don’t know, happier, somehow?” Sasha considered himself to be a fairly contented person at all times, but he rarely saw this side shine through Leo. “It’s a good thing. Definitely a good thing.”

                “You seem happier, too,” pointed out Leo. “Any reason why?”

                “It’s my birthday in a few days,” he admitted, looking at the ground.

                “On which day?”

                “The twenty-third.”

                “How old are you?”

                “…Twenty-three.”

                To Sasha’s surprise, Leo smiled. “It’s a golden birthday, Sasha. Savor it.” He then promptly left _La Republique_ without saying another word, and without leaving Sasha enough time to ask what a “golden birthday” was or how he was to savor it.

                When he arrived home, as usual, the first thing he did was to make a cup of tea. It was kind of ironic, he thought, that he worked in a coffee shop and the first thing he did when he got home was to make tea, but so be it. Tea, or “delicious brown nectar of the gods”, as he called it, was one of his only things to look forward to in the day. While waiting for the tea to start boiling, he vaguely considered calling Kostya before ultimately deciding against it. Although he had taken wide strides to get away from all of it, Sasha longed to be in General Winter’s grasp again. The idea of Saint Petersburg was never further than the second matter upon his mind.

                And yes, it was the _idea_ of Saint Petersburg which drew him in, rather than the actual city. He hadn’t been home since the week his grandmother had died, and since then, in his mind, the city had undergone a gentle reformation into one which shadowed the whole of Quebec City at _least_ twenty times over. It was the manifestation of one million sparkling suns, a diadem on the Baltic Sea, and Sasha considered himself lucky to call it his hometown. On the other hand, however, his idea of the place made him never want to go back for fear of disappointment.

                It was a _choice_ , he reminded himself, to stay in Quebec, no matter how he felt about it. He had set himself out with the intent of going back to Russia _eventually_ , but that _eventually_ took no root in the present, and perhaps never would. Five _years_ in this country sounded unthinkable to Sasha, but would he think the same once he had already been here for three? Would he last a decade here, long enough to lose his grip on Russian together and be an alien wherever he went? Sasha didn’t have multiple degrees in mathematics and physics, let alone any degrees at all. Where could he go from here?

                It wasn’t as if he had never thought about the future before, but the arrival of his twenty-third year brought him the realization that the lines around his mouth and eyes weren’t going to grow any more delicate, and that soon, even Kostya would stop lolling around Saint Petersburg and find his own way. He had been told today that he had seemed happier than usual, but when he dwelt on it, what was there to be happy about? It had been two years already, and he had been in the same place. Birthdays, he realized, _did_ lose their gilt luster with age. Even though he was only twenty-three, but for the first time he felt as if he was getting _old_ faster than he could process the notion.

                When the kettle began to whistle, he poured himself a cup of tea.

\---

                Maybe it was because he was a gross pretentious twenty-something, but Leo had never felt Sasha to be a person particularly attentive to other peoples’ thoughts and emotions. Sure, he was _technically_ still in his twenties, but there was a _vast_ difference between feeling twenty-something and still being twenty-something. The fact of the matter was that his heart didn’t really remember how old he was. Whether this made him a fool or not was up for discretion.

                The other fact of the matter was that he _was_ happy today, ecstatic, actually, and was glad that someone had noticed. He thought of the copy of his CV lying on his desk at the co-op, and _another_ copy of his CV that was in a folder on the desk of a M. Paul Barras. Traversing the snow-stricken, windy sidewalks, he slowly but surely made his way to the Physics Center of the University where hopefully, _hopefully_ he’d have a good interview, and have an actual real job again. He’d walked by the place one million times before and had never really glanced at it, but now the brick-and-glass building had a gleam relative to all the others which surrounded it. Not thinking about where he was going, his feet knew the way. Oh, he _really_ wished that he had invested in some sort of hat before he’d cut his hair short, but he _was_ satisfied with the gloves he’d remembered to bring with him this time. No lightbulb rested in his tight pockets anymore, but only his wallet and keys. His cell phone never received any calls anyway, so there was no point in bringing it anywhere.

                It was only when he instinctively looked up that his confident mood was completely destroyed, once again reduced. The sandy building he now walked past wasn’t just _familiar_ to him, but an irrevocable part of him. Where was he? No attention had been paid to the roads for ten minutes now, and it took a moment for him to reorient himself.

                Oh. He knew this place. It was the sandy building with the fire escape that always left flecks of white paint on his boots. If he looked up now, maybe he could even see Josephine on their old, rose-ridden balcony, watching the streets. It was a habit of hers, Leo forced himself to remember, that she would sit on their balcony, rain or shine, and watch the street in the evenings. She would have taken the roses inside long ago, but perhaps she would still be there. He wondered if she was still with Hippolyte Charles. He wondered if, after he had left, she had continued her custom of watching the street from the balcony. And, although he knew it was a bad idea, he had to know. It would have been a better idea to shut the thought out of mind and keep walking. Snow began to fall. He had a job interview to be getting to. With this one glance, everything would be ruined.

                He looked up. Josephine, on her bare balcony as always, happened to look down at the sudden movement below her.

Leo had no idea how long their awkward eye contact went on for; it could have been a split second and it could have been five minutes, but if he had to guess by the number of cars and other pedestrians that went by, it took thirty seconds for Josephine to lose interest in him and focus on the street again. They had spent five years together, and all Leo warranted was a passive thirty second glance. Perhaps, he thought, she hadn’t recognized him, but then he realized that it was impossible. His appearance had changed, but wasn’t his demeanor more or less the same? Hers certainly was, and he once again wondered if the last five years had even given her anything but the stability she had gleaned- and eventually taken- from him. He had thought the same thing about his ex-fiancée, Desirée, and about the others before that. Well, now _he_ was the one left without any stability in his life, and…

He checked his old wristwatch and began to walk again, shutting the half-finished emotional thesis out of his mind. He refused to sacrifice anything but time to Josephine anymore. Not a job interview, not his emotional stability, _nothing_. Nothing but time, after all, was worth sparing for someone else.

\---

                If there was anything that Leo regretted about his job interview, it wasn’t something _within_ the interview itself, but instead an exterior factor: he wished that he had stayed in school long enough to have done a PhD, regardless of how painstaking and time-consuming it would have been. He had only stayed in France long enough to earn his master’s in research, but even that was probably nothing compared to the people younger than him who had managed to cram more years of studying into their lifetimes, and hadn’t wasted considerable amounts of time on personal, unimportant matters. His only evidently apparent feature which put him above the others was the fact that he had already spent three years working at a lab, and hoped that it would be enough.

                Now, through the continuous snow he headed to Sasha’s apartment, even though he wasn’t invited, he was shirking on his duties at the co-op, and he didn’t even know whether Sasha would be home or not. Although the idea of showing up at someone else’s house uninvited would normally occur to him as uncalled for, it was _cold_ , and the co-op was too far away for his strength to last until. The usual six hours of sleep had proved to be completely insufficient for twenty-four as long as these.

                When Leo reached Sasha’s apartment at last, the warmth of the building had turned the crystals in his hair back into droplets of water, and he likened himself to a stray dog as he carefully knocked on the door twice. His interview clothes which had given him confidence such a short time ago now dragged against both his skin and the inside of his coat, damp with both sweat and humidity. In contrast, his fingers and nose had lost most of the feeling in them, and he was certain that whatever he looked like, it wasn’t good. His first gently knock futile, he knocked again, this time more sharply, and Sasha opened the door after a few seconds of fiddling the handle around.

                Despite the fact that he hadn’t been out in the cold for hours now, Sasha’s cheeks were tinted slightly pink, and a gait showed itself in his walk. He squinted down at Leo. “…Leo?” he asked rhetorically. “What’re you doing here?”

                Leo didn’t shy away from Sasha’s confused gaze. “I was outside, and it was cold, and it was too far to walk to the co-op.”

                “So you came here?”

                “I believe it was implied by the fact that I’m here.”

                Opening the door completely now, Sasha asked, “Do you want to… come in? And have a drink with me?”

                Leo stepped inside and took his coat off, hanging it on the back of Sasha’s door. “No thanks to the second part. Have you been day drinking?” The moment he took his coat off, he felt that both a physical and metaphorical weight had been lifted off of him, but was certain that he still looked like a hot mess.

                Sasha shrugged. “Not that much. Not enough to actually, you know…”

                To a certain extent, Leo was envious of the people who could hold their liquor well, but at the same time it was just too entertaining to watch other people be drunk when he was still sober. As usual, the two went to the table in Sasha’s kitchen, where now sat a bottle of vodka and a shot glass. Taking the bottle in his hands, he poured and took another shot of the clear beverage. His esophagus felt like a pipeline for battery acid, but in a way, it felt kind of good.

                “Listen, I can leave if you want me to, I mean, I don’t want to impose while you’re in this… condition. How many shots have you had?”

                It took a second for Sasha to register the question. “Six,” he answered, to Leo’s relief. Six wasn’t _that_ many. “No, no, seven… eight… seven. Definitely seven.”

                Seven was kind of pushing the boundaries of being drunk and being not-drunk, as far as Leo was concerned, and decided that he would rather take on the cold than a drunk Sasha. After all, from here to the Physics Center it had been a fifteen-minute walk, and from here to the co-op it was another fifteen- minute walk, but it was _cold_ and _dark_ and _uncomfortable._

                “I’m going to go now,” said Leo, awkwardly walking back towards Leo’s front door, “but if you get wasted, I’m definitely _not_ going to cover your shift tomorrow.” Sasha didn’t say anything.

\---

                “It was incredibly awkward,” Leo later recounted to Giuseppina after he had returned to the co-op and taken an hour-long shower to revive his limbs from the cold. They were in the living room in which someone had recently hung a flag proclaiming the word “MARIJUANA” with a giant marijuana leaf. Upon glancing around the room, he noticed the flag for the first time, shocked and slightly appalled by it. The people at the co-op were too indiscriminate in their décor for Leo’s taste.

                A moment later, a lanky, good-looking white guy walked through the door and sat down on the suspicious co-op sofa next to Giuseppina. From the moment he entered the room, Leo didn’t like anything about him solely due to his swaggering manner.

                ‘ _This guy,’_ Leo thought, ‘ _seems like one of those fellows who think that they’re hot and cultured because they spent time in some ambiguous part of Asia while taking a gap year from a private college.’_ Condensing his unsung adversity for the guy into this single, concise thought, he shot a glance at Giuseppina as if to say, “Who is this guy?”

                Giuseppina took the hint, and explained to Leo, “Leo, this is my partner, Arthur.” She turned to Arthur. “Arthur, this is Leo.”

                “Nice to meet you,” Arthur said, not holding out his hand. His accent wasn’t quite Quebecois, but it wasn’t quite French, either.

                “Nice to meet you. Where are you from?” Just like that, Leo had popped the question.

                Arthur’s answer was cold and precise, and it was evident that he had decided that he didn’t like Leo, either. “Dublin,” he said, and then added, “but I also spent some time in Calcutta.”

                “You realize that it’s not called Calcutta anymore? It’s Kolkata.” ‘ _I hate British people.’_

                “That’s like, the way I was raised to say it.”

                “Why did your people have to colonize so much of the world?” Leo demanded, before realizing that it was the most uncalled-for thing that he’d said in years. Without saying another word, he stood up and left the room. As he left, he heard Arthur loudly whisper to Giuseppina, “ _I want to not like that guy but I’m really just confused.”_

                Leo wondered if this was what it was like to be too tired to function, went up to his room, hastily changed clothes, and went to sleep. Normally his thoughts were filled with memories of Josephine, good and bad, before he finally rendered himself unconscious, but this time he found the strength to forgo that ritual and just sleep.

\---

                When he woke up at 6 AM again, although he had gotten ten full hours of sleep, it felt as if it had been an hour and a half. Finally, he could dwell on what an unreasonably lousy day he had had yesterday. He usually left the co-op before anyone else had even woken up, which gave a nice flow to his morning routine.

                ‘ _Yesterday was the worst day of the past two months,’_ he thought as he was brushing his teeth, ‘ _for multiple reasons.’_

                Then again when he was dressing for work, ‘ _First there was Sasha, who acted_ weird _all morning…’_

                Then again when he drank his usual half-cup of coffee, ‘ _then it was… no, I don’t even want to think about that…’_ (His mind was only calm when all thoughts of Josephine had been put away, and usually not even then. Today was one of those times.)

                When he arrived at _La Republique_ , the thought ‘ _I hate Arthur, pretentious incompetent ne’er-do-well’._ Although most of him was annoyed by Arthur, a small part of him was envious of his ease of demeanor. No complement to hatred was comparable to jealousy.

                It was only after he clocked in and put on his apron that he saw Sasha, but at this point was too fed up to start a conversation, and left it to Sasha if he wanted one. ‘ _This apron, too…’_ Even though Leo had only worked here for a year, no stains befell the apron, but it had gotten old of its own accord after countless cycles of washing and drying. Even the threads in the monogrammed logo of _La Republique_ had begun to fade and fray.

                He had been staring out of the large shop window for a minute before Sasha, standing behind him, said, “Leo, I’m sorry for yesterday.”

                In four sharp words, Leo brushed him off. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

                Sasha hadn’t meant for his statement of apology to devolve into some big ordeal, but still, he was impressed at Leo’s ability to end it in four words. Four words- _don’t worry about it_ \- and he had evaluated and concluded the entire situation, his tone suggesting that the events had been both his and Sasha’s fault. Was this what it meant, he thought, to be mature, or was his rapid-fire response a sign of immaturity? To take dominance of the situation in fewer than five words? Leo had been doing this more and more lately, most notably saying “I’m too old for this” to shut down a scenario. It was the secret to taking dominance of any interaction: learn to subtly make it about yourself, but not to the extent of being intrusive. Sasha had played into this, of course, by asking Leo more questions than he spoke about himself.

                “Why were you out so late?” he asked. “Did you have gloves with you?” He intended the latter question as a reference to that time that Leo hadn’t been able to move his fingers.

                The two had to halt their conversation as the first customer of the day walked in, but continued after she had left as if no interruption had taken place.

                “I was at a job interview.” Another concise six words which connoted far more than they denoted.

                For want of something to do with his hands, Sasha picked up a cup and began to polish it. “You’re quitting?”

                In his typical Leo I’m-so-done-with-this fashion, Leo glanced over at Sasha. “Given that I’m accepted, then probably in about a month. I’m too old for _this_.” He gestured at the interior of _La Republique._

                Turning away to look out the window as well, Sasha rolled his eyes. “I can get a real job, too,  
 he bantered. “I’ll be a journalist. I’ll write a column about you.”

                “What will it be called?”

                Without missing a beat, he answered, “Crotchety asshole still in his twenties thinks that he’s ninety and acts like it, too.”

                “Hey!” snapped Leo. “Nobody gets on your case about doing anything with your life because you’re twenty-three and that’s _young_. Nobody ever gets on _my_ case about doing anything because I’m twenty-nine and I’m expected to have my life together. Nobody tells you when you’re twenty-nine that you’re young and still have time to figure things out, because of the fact of the matter is that you’re _not_ young enough to be considered reckless anymore and you’re not old enough to warrant any respect, either.” After this long outburst, he was quiet for another moment before adding, “I did, however, think that your jest about journalism was funny.”

                Although Sasha thought that Leo was definitely over-reacting for someone who only hadn’t had a job for one year, he decided not to say anything else to make the tension worse than it already was. Luckily, though, this was the time when people began to trickle into the store, and gave him an excuse to not say anything.

\---

                After their shift was over and the _other_ people who worked afternoons had taken over, Sasha decided that he would just not try to talk to Leo if he was going to either get brushed off or worse over and over again. Besides, he had made plans to see a film with Klemens that night, so at least there was something to look forward to.

                ‘ _Whatever. I don’t care anymore. I would like nothing more right now than to go home and have a nice cup of tea.’_

                And he did, and today’s cup of tea was surprisingly better than what he was used to. When he was still in school, he had looked forward to his cup of tea the entire day, and he felt the same jaded relief now. The relief, however, was ruined when he caught the sight of his French editions of Tolstoy and Pushkin still lying on his living room coffee table.

                He was a good Orthodox Christian, so why did God feel the need to torture him like this? Why did everything, every single tiny thing, remind him of Leo? Why did every material object contain inextricable remnants of him? Sasha hated it, he hated it so much. Nothing ever seemed to belong to _just_ him anymore, but to the drawer of his mind which contained everything alien to his identity as a Russian— everything which incited in him strong memories of Quebec, even though a majority of the people he associated with were also aliens to this land. Sasha did not categorize any of his relationships according to the time in which their foundations were struck, but instead by the place in which they were struck. There were people whom he had known in five states, and in each they became a different person. Kostya, for example, he had known in Russia, Germany, France, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, and in each place their relationship had been a piece of elastic which became a little bit looser every time it was stretched out, but otherwise snapped back into its original form. Sasha likened people to potted plants which wouldn’t grow drastically if all of the roots were held in the same place, but could either thrive or burn up when transplanted into a more erratic location. Even though he had kept his branches meticulously pruned, they had still grown and hardened, whereas his brother largely remained the same. Even though he held his roots dear to him, it did not change the fact that the present and the future were growing while the past was permanently stunted. Sasha _was_ largely the same as he had been two years ago, but the new pieces of him had slowly cumulated until there was _something_ different, although he didn’t know exactly what. It was the same difference that had led him to leave his Russian volumes of Tolstoy at home and buy new ones in French. The books, too had felt new and different in French.

                After thinking all of it through, Sasha regretted wasting yesterday evening by taking innumerable shots of vodka to forget about his pain, even though there was no pain to be found. The fabricated pain may have excused his actions, or at the very least made them understandable, but he hadn’t really done it out of self-pity. He had done it because he _wanted_ to drink, and was no longer ashamed of himself. Acknowledging that he had changed (albeit little) since he had come here had been uncomfortable, but now he saw it more as a matter to rejoice than regret. His grandmother Catherina had always referred to the early twenties as the “elastic years”, because everything gave the illusion of changing drastically but not really at all. Realizing that he didn’t really owe anyone any apology for anything at this point, he felt more liberated than he had since he had moved here. He didn’t owe an apology to Leo for day-drinking, he didn’t owe an apology to Kostya for being “insincere” or whatever, and he didn’t owe any apology to his family for wasting their money by deciding to move to Quebec, and least of all did he owe an apology to himself. There was no point in waiting until he had been alive for almost three decades to admit that opportunity cost was absolutely meaningless.

                Finishing his cup of tea, he glanced again at the volumes, and decided to put them back in his bookshelf; there was no use allowing them to accumulate dust in the hopes that someone would soon read them.


	4. The Golden Birthday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha's twenty-third year arrived with some hope. but mostly unapologetic reluctance.

                When Sasha looked off of his balcony, too much of the street was visible for his liking. The snow which had fallen earlier today had stuck onto the frozen, glittery ground, but the passersby had slowly but surely trudged through it so that their difficulty disappeared and all that was left was a grey, watery, slimy sludge with bits of newspapers and cigarette butts interspersed in it. He shuddered to think of all of the bacteria and grime which had always been present, but which never quite made itself so visible as when it was mixed with sleet. The sidewalk underneath, stuck with glistening frozen water, glittered like pieces of a broken beer bottle.

                “What are you thinking about?” asked Klemens, watching from inside of the building. He had to assist in a trial tomorrow, but had decided to go out for the special occasion of Sasha’s birthday.

                Sasha shook his head, clearing the image of the sludge out of his mind. “Nothing. Just about how disgusting the sludge on the street is.”

                Klemens sighed, leaning against the door frame. Both he and Sasha were aware that the heat was being let out of the building, but Sasha didn’t seem to care very much. “It’s like a metaphor for human existence,” he contemplated. “We all arrive on the planet utterly unblemished and virgin, but the more people we receive contact with, the more undesirable we become. Eventually, all that is left of the spirit is a disgusting sludge, making others wish that we had never come in the first place.”

                “That was the worst analogy I’ve heard in my life, and I once had to endure listening to someone compare a hunting rifle to a child.”

                Pretending to be hurt, he replied, “You’re always so mean to me. I would report you to the police for harassment if it wasn’t your birthday.” He paused. “Besides, an analogy isn’t even the same thing as a metaphor.”

                Sasha smirked. “I’ve already decided what I’m going to title my article about you when I’m a journalist.”

                “What?” This _what_ was more of an apprehensive statement than a question.

                “Local Man has Degrees in French and in Writing, Is Still Somehow Terrible at Writing in French.”

                “I had no idea that you were into investigative reporting. You can win a Pulitzer Prize for that, you know.”

                Sasha then gave up on this train of conversation, because there was no way that he could win when discussing journalism with Klemens. Sometimes he forgot that Klemens had far more experience in almost everything than he did. Despite their differences, however, thy had managed to become close friend in the past couple of months, Klemens as the fidgety new lawyer on the block, and Sasha as… Sasha. He didn’t actually know _why_ someone as intelligent as Klemens would willingly spend time with him, and sometimes he was blown away at the sheer amounts of information scattered around in the other’s mind, but as long as they were together, he would treasure it.

                “Hey, fuck you,” he said, cumulating all of his endearment for Klemens into a single statement.

                “Love you too.”

                Sasha blushed, stepping inside his abode again and closing the door behind him. He took his shoes off inside the door. “Say, you want to go somewhere or so something?”

                Nodding, Klemens replied, “Sure, as long as it doesn’t involve any drinking. Do you ever even leave your apartment?”

                “Winter is the time for staying indoors, drinking tea, and reading nineteenth century Russian literature. I’m not really doing anything for the next couple of days because I don’t have to work, though… I should probably go to church, even though I’m not Catholic, but I don’t really think it matters that much…” The last time Sasha had gone to church was back in Russia, and he didn’t really want to even now, but the idea of going to church had somehow worked its way into his sense of imperative.

                “That’s what we call heresy, Sasha, and you should be tried without due process and burned at the stake. Now that you mention it, I should probably go to church too…”

                “I’ll go if you go,” suggested Sasha.

                Klemens sighed. “Sure. Is this what millennials do for fun? Go to church as a bonding activity?”

                “You’re forgetting the alcoholism.”

                “Egregious, really.”

                After a few more minutes of friendly banter, the two decided that it was too cold and dark and late to do anything; although it was only six, the sun had already gone down, which would make going outside an entirely unenjoyable experience. Besides, Klemens had to be dressed in court at eleven tomorrow, so it wasn’t worth doing anything to wear himself out today.

                After a few more minutes of friendly banter, Sasha proposed going ice skating. He had done figure skating for years when he lived in Russia, but hadn’t thought back to it once in all the time that he had lived here. He hadn’t done it so long that while he still had a flair for being elegance on ice, he no longer possessed confidence in taking risks to do it. For the first time in his life, he seriously regretted stopping his old life where he had. He kind of envied the sense of self-preservation and responsibility that law had given his friend, but regretted that he didn’t have the sort of patience to go to school for seven years for a law degree. The more he thought about it, though, the more the idea of actually going to college appealed to him. However, that would probably require moving to Montreal, if not back to Russia altogether. When he vaguely considered the prospects of going to university, it was the first time in his life that he had regretted not learning English. The year twenty-three arrived with some hope, but mostly unapologetic reluctance.

\---

                Sasha woke up the next morning later than he was accustomed to waking up, at 11 AM, and his first thoughts were of Klemens and how his trial would push along for the rest of the day. He hadn’t disclosed any details of it according to the law, but said that it was something minor regarding a theft, and that the verdict would probably be handed down on the same day unless things became _really_ ugly, which probably wouldn’t happen. As Klemens often said, egregious, really.

                He closed his eyes, giving them a break from having to adjust to the light shining through the thin lace curtains. Being twenty-three, he thought, felt the exact same as being twenty-two, and evidently the gradual changes necessary to make him feel like a different person hadn’t taken place yet. So, he went through his morning routine- brushing his teeth, getting dressed, drinking tea- and thought nothing of it. Then, he decided to go out.

                The sludge from yesterday had melted and dripped into the sewer grates on the streets, and it was rather warm, to even the snow covering the rooftops had begun to melt and drip down the sides of buildings. Sasha found the rhythm of the drip-drip to be soothing, and hummed a small tune to the monotonous beat. Finding some coins in his pocket, he even stopped to buy one of the newspapers from one of the machines on the street corner, walking along with it folded in his hand and finding himself to feel quite sophisticated. By the time the church bells struck twelve o’clock, he was already ten blocks away from his apartment building. For someone who had never smoked, now seemed like an awfully good time to smoke.

                However, he decided to not indulge in smoking, and finding his walk to be disappointingly uneventful, walked back to his apartment. He has halfway returned when his cell phone began to loudly blare the Tetris theme song, and after a couple of seconds he fished it out of his pocket and answered.

                “Hello?” he asked. His ringtone loud and embarrassing, he hadn’t taken the time to see who was calling him before picking it up.

                “ _Hey, Sasha_ ,” the voice came from the other end. Sasha recognized Leo’s voice in an instant, and wondered why he had called. Ever since Leo had gotten angry at him last week, the two hadn’t spoken much because both were too filled with pride to make amends. Leo continued, ” _Are you doing anything tomorrow evening?”_

                Sasha thought for a second. “I’m probably going to go to church at some point tomorrow, but otherwise, I have nothing planned.” The lack of Christmas merriment he had experienced since he had come here was slightly depressing, but mostly he felt indifferent about it. “Why?”

                Even though Leo tried to sound casual through the phone it was obvious that he was trying very hard. “ _Almost everyone at the co-op has gone home for the next few days and it’s the holiday so I wondered if you would like to come over. You can meet my housemate Giuseppina.”_

“Sounds… wonderful. I would love to come. Where do you live?” After Leo exchanged his address to Sasha, he hung up, and all of the self-empowering thoughts that Sasha had had over the past week evaporated from his conscience. He remembered why he was in love with Leo.

                Love! Sasha had used the L-word, something which hadn’t happened in a long, long time. Growing up in Russia, he had learned long ago that _if_ he ever fell in love with anyone, it would be better kept a secret. Even so, however, there was nobody who Sasha had really fallen in love with. He had briefly had a girlfriend when he was fifteen, but he found himself unable to feel anything for her but friendly fondness and otherwise cold indifference. Although he considered that relationship imperative to the development of his emotional consciousness, he saw it otherwise as her failure to endear herself to him. This time, it was different because _he_ was the one who would probably never get Leo to actually _like_ him, let alone love him. His thoughts quickly devolving into paranoia about never finding love, he brushed all of it off with a single thought. ‘ _Sasha,’_ he thought, ‘ _stop being stupid. This is just platonic love.’_ His heart of hearts spoke differently, but his affected thoughts had always been a shield from his sincere emotions, and now was no different.

\---

                The date was the twenty-fourth of December, and Arthur was becoming increasingly annoyed with looking at the squiggly lines on the paper and trying to figure out what was happening.

                ‘ _Why did I decide to become a physicist?’_ he asked himself. ‘ _What did I see in this career? I wanted to study French. I should have studied French.’_ Groaning loudly because he was the only person in the room, he threw his head back and decided to take a walk around the complex before coming back to his work.

                Arthur didn’t actually decide for himself to become a physicist, and didn’t see anything in the career, either. The only reason he had chosen this career path was because he hadn’t done much at Eton, spent his late teens and early twenties doing drugs in India until his father died and his mother moved to Brussels and gave him the option of either going to university or being cut off from the rest of the family. He had chosen going to university for physics, because his brother knew someone in Quebec who could get him a job. At some point along the way, as well, he had changed his last name from Wesley to Wellesley. That was his life story, and now he was here, and _couldn’t figure out what the god damn squiggly line meant_.

                As he walked out of the actual lab and gently locked the door behind him so that nobody else could come in. All of the other people who worked here were either out of town or elsewhere, and _someone_ had to come in and collect data, so Arthur had volunteered to do it. After else, he didn’t have anything else to do but drink and fervently deny the existence of God while everyone else went to Church.

                Neither, it seemed, did Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, a guy who worked here even though Arthur didn’t really know what he did. Seeing the man doing paperwork through the glass windows of his office, Arthur decided to stop by and have a chat with the man. He knocked twice on the door of his office before entering.

                Cambacérès looked up at the intrusion. “Arthur,” he said, not batting an eyelid, “you know you’re allowed to go home sometimes, right?”

                Arthur sighed, closed the door, and sat down on one of the comfortable chairs in the office. Despite the inherent coldness of the grey walls and thinly carpeted floor, Cambacérès had managed to add some warmth back in by replacing the blinds with curtains and adding some choice artwork onto the walls. It wasn’t anything worth looking at for more than a few seconds, but it still managed to do the trick for this shabby little room. “They said I’d get paid extra for coming in to take data when nobody else could do it. What are you doing here?”

                “Being an attorney has its sexy moments, but doing paperwork is not one of them.”

                ‘ _Why the fuck does a physics lab need an attorney?’_

                Cambacérès continued, “Did you hear that they finally hired someone to replace Paul?” Paul was Paul Barras, a researcher who had received a job offer at another, larger laboratory in Montreal.

                In return, Arthur narrowed his eyes. “Yeah,” he replied coldly, “Leo Bonaparte. I know him. He lives with my girlfriend.”

                “I thought his name was Napoleon.” He found rather amusing Arthur’s implication that he didn’t like Leo because he lived with his girlfriend, but didn’t show it.

                “He goes by Leo...” trailed off Arthur before continuing, “I don’t like that guy. There’s something about him that’s just weird, and bad, and just seems _off_. You know that I don’t use words like that lightly.”

                “I’m sure you’re…”

                “No!” he exclaimed again with a force he didn’t know he had. “I’ve looked into his eyes and... he's just... awful. I can't explain it, but he's just terrible.”

                “If there’s one thing that my years of being an attorney have taught me, Arthur, it’s that you have to understand something from multiple angles before you can make a conclusion, okay?” If anyone else had spoken to Arthur like that, he would have been annoyed at the patronizing tone, but Cambacérès was usually right about this sort of thing.

                “I thought that being an attorney was about being as aggressively dogmatic as possible.”

                Cambacérès smiled. “Once you’re done with step one, _then_ you move on to the dogmatism aspect. So just try to see good things about this guy before.”

                Sighing, Arthur replied, “Okay, okay…”, and was considerably less frustrated and upset. When he returned to his work, he finally focused on physics once again.

\---

                Leo felt the twenty-third roll to the twenty-fourth, his mind restless and the people in the next room over even more so. The main thing that he hated about living at the co-op wasn’t the fact that the doors were perpetually squeaky and the floors were perpetually creaky and that the basement was always leaky, but that the walls were paper-thin and _couldn’t the couple next door just go to sleep already_? If everyone else in the building wasn’t asleep, he would seriously consider banging on their door as a humiliation tactic.

                The time was dark with orange streetlights with moths fluttering about, the light reflected in the puddles of sludge that the snow had left behind. Watching the moths across the street continually smash into the modules of light, he felt more lonely than he had in twenty-nine years. This was reminiscent of boarding school in France, when he would lay awake at night and listen to the sound of his roommates sleeping as a convoluted lullaby, only this time his house mates were having sex loudly as if to mock him.

                In an ideal world _he_ would have been the one to be having loud sex right now, but those days were over. He still desperately wanted to be with Josephine, but those days were over, too. That was in September, and now it was December and the well of his tears had run dry but the sediment at the bottom was still as wet as it had ever been. Yet, the entirety of his sentiment had changed; the misery which he would have spent pages and hours describing before could now be summarized in three words: _I miss her_. He hadn’t remembered missing anyone since he had written the fifth and final draft of _Clisson et Eugenie_ , of which all five were still lying in one of his desk drawers.

                From across the room, his cell phone vibrated twice before it fell silent again, and Leo slowly got up to see what it was. There was no point in sleeping now, anyway, if the next few days were to be spent completely idle. It couldn’t be a text message, he thought, because nobody ever texted him, so it had to be an email. His fingers didn’t fumble once as he entered his absurdly long twenty-seven-character passcode, even though his eyes were temporarily blinded. After the ordeal was completed, he opened his inbox and squinted to read the small text appearing on the screen.

                He felt nothing, but his only immediate thought was, ‘ _This is really an odd hour to receive a job offer.”_ Without even reading the benefits, he quickly typed an acceptance email, and, despite his previous thoughts, went quickly to sleep.

\---

                That morning, when he officially woke up, it was eight o’clock and the orange streetlights outside were the same as ever, but something told him that it was _time to wake up_ , so after doing his usual morning routine, he went downstairs to the co-op’s kitchen to enjoy a cup of coffee. In the kitchen _also_ enjoying a cup of coffee was Antoine, who watched Leo very carefully as he looked through the coffee and tea cabinet.

                “Are you looking for the good coffee?” he asked.

                “Yes.”

                Antoine raised his mug, and replied, “This is the last of it. All we have left is instant coffee which I’m pretty sure someone dumpster dove for.” Leo sighed, and reached for a box of teabags instead. Now that he had a new job, he would finally make enough money to move out of the godforsaken co-op. Unfortunately, he started in one month, so he would have to hand in his two weeks’ notice to _La Republique_ in about two weeks and then wait it out. Universities! They always took so long to get things moving!

                “What are you doing awake so early?”

                “I’m always awake at 8 AM, Leo. Always. It’s nice to watch the rest of the world wake up.”

                Leo put a vessel of filtered water on the stove, and set it to boil. “I agree.” The idea of watching the rest of the world wake up was _especially_ applicable for him because he worked in a coffee shop. “I usually wake up earlier, but whoever lives next to me was having loud sex for most of the night.”

                “You don’t know who lives next to you?” asked Antoine, raising an eyebrow.

                “I know that they exist, but I just never see them entering or exiting their room. I haven’t actually met most of the people who live here, either. Really just you and Giuseppina.”

                Two seconds later, a Giuseppina still in her pajamas walked into the kitchen, shortly followed by Arthur.

                “Oh, speak of the devil,” Antoine said.

                Giuseppina yawned. “What were you saying about me?”

                “Only good things.”

                Meanwhile, Leo was shocked and appalled. “Do you…” he started. “Giuseppina, you live in the room on the second floor next to the room in the corner?”

                She hesitated before answering. “Yeah… why?”

                ‘ _Oh my god_.’ “No reason.” It was a lie.

                “Okay?”

                Nobody spoke, so Antoine spoke up again. “The only coffee left here is the instant coffee, in case you were thinking about having any. And we only have powdered milk.”

                Giuseppina shook her head. “That’s no good, but on the bright side, we can finally use the co-op’s money to buy the Christmas coffee blends.”

                “No, no, no, no, no, ‘Seppina, you’ve got it all wrong. All of the special blends just taste like regular coffee but sour, and they’re more expensive.”

                “Seconded,” Leo added before Giuseppina could say anything else. “I didn’t know that the co-op pays for coffee.”

                “It’s kind of like…” she explained, “It’s kind of like when a company buys coffee for all of its employees, but we’re the employees even though we live here because the co-op is a symbiotic non-for-profit organization.”

                When the water started to boil, Leo took it off of the heat and poured it over his teabag. It wasn’t the sort of black tea that Sasha always made, but gave off a pleasant orange-y aroma. Arthur stared at him, and asked, “You have teabags?”

                As if to answer, Antoine sighed. “Everyone always buys boxes of tea but they never finish them and leave the boxes here when they move out, so as a result, we have an entire cabinet full.” He took a long drink of his coffee, which had to have cooled down by now. “I’d highly advise you to check it out.”

                About five minutes later, the four of them were sitting at the four sides of the wide co-op dining table with their respective breakfast drinks and with nothing interesting to talk about. Leo was tempted to get up and leave because he felt that Arthur was intruding on their co-op dynamic, but thought that it would be rude and so stayed. Perhaps, he thought, Arthur was only intruding upon _him_. He had stayed relatively quiet the entire time, but continually seemed to be examining Leo’s every word, every action, and even every thought. Although it struck Leo as strange, he pretended not to notice and turned his charming conversationalist level up to a nine. After that, the conversation among the four flowed steadily and was even interesting at times, but Leo he could sense that this change in his demeanor made Arthur even _more_ suspicious of him. He was _annoying_ , damn it, and it was more evident to Leo than ever why the British were hated. There was _technically_ a difference between Britain and Ireland, but did it really matter? The answer was an unequivocal NO, or at least not to Leo.

                Although a miasma of thoughts arose in Leo’s mind about Arthur, the broadest way to categorize them was, ‘ _I don’t like him.’_ The strength of not liking him only grew when the conversation turned to everyone’s careers after Leo asked both him and Giuseppina what they did for a living.

                “I’m a singer and an actress,” Giuseppina had answered, “which is why I get home so late at night. Thankfully, though, the show I was in closed last week, so my acting company is taking a break.”

                Arthur had answered in an affected geniality, “I’m a physicist.”

                “Really?” asked Leo. “I’m a physicist too. Do you work in a lab around here?”

                “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I work in the lab at the university that’s not too far from here?”

                “What a coincidence, I just accepted a job offer to work there this morning.” Egregious, really.

                At this point, Arthur too had summarized his thoughts about Leo into a cumulative statement which simultaneously excited and intimidated him: ‘ _I don’t like Leo. There’s something about him that strikes me as distinctly evil, and I’m the only one who sees through it._ ’ A moment later, he tacked on another definitive clause. ‘… _He has a good taste in tea, though_.’


	5. Epistles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha still hasn't been to law school, Leo gets two letters from his family, and Klemens is a let-down altogether.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Napoleon survived an assassination attempt on December 24. That man just couldn't catch a break.

                When Sasha knocked on the splintering co-op door, he looked around anxiously and wondered if this was the right place. It was, to put it lightly, a wreck. Even on the stone pathway to the door he had wondered if he would accidentally step on a syringe or in a hole in the ground, drop his flowers, and break his ankle. He was therefore, extra cautious before he took each step. Was this really where Leo lived? He could live wherever the hell he wanted, of course, but the co-op seemed as if it was below a certain level of dignity. And yet, something about the run-down state of the house and the broken front lights gave it a sort of perverse romance. When nobody opened the door after two knocks, he gingerly grasped the rusty lion-shaped door knocker and rapped against the wood twice. When someone came to open the door, he thought, ‘ _Thank god, it’s Leo.’_

                He almost looked festive wearing a red sweater and a pair of trousers. Of course, he wore this sweater somewhat often, but still Sasha chose to believe that it was in honor of the holiday. He handed the bouquet of flowers to Leo, mumbling something incoherent about holiday wishes and prosperity.

                “Thank you, Sasha,” replied Leo warmly, stepping aside to allow Sasha to come inside the house. He fingered the soft petals. Carnations, he noted. Green ones. Although some might have considered Sasha’s choice distasteful, Leo was just thankful to have something to brighten up the otherwise dreary co-op kitchen. “I love them.” The preexisting redness of Sasha’s cheeks covered his blush.

                Upon stepping inside, he took a brief look around before hanging his hat and coat up on the coat rack. The inside wasn’t _great_ , but it was definitely an improvement from the ash pit of the front yard. “You live here?” he asked.

                Leo grinned, almost playfully. “You know what they call it. The co-op upon the hill.” Sasha returned this statement with a confused stare, to which Leo shook his head and explained that it was a joke and that nobody actually said that.

                Sasha rolled his eyes, and said, “You have the worst sense of humor.”

                Leo led him into the living room area of the co-op, which thankfully had been cleaned up since the last time that Leo had described it to him. Not a single speck of cigarette ash could be seen on any surface, the walls were sparkling, and the flag with the word “marijuana” on it had mysteriously disappeared. (Both unwilling to be associated with that image, Giuseppina cut it up and threw it away while Leo stood guard. Whomever the flag belonged to never mentioned it.) About five other people were kicking up a storm in the room, including a woman whom Sasha assumed was Giuseppina, two somewhat hipster-looking guys, and, to Sasha’s surprise, Klemens von Metternich in the flesh.

                “Klemens!” Sasha exclaimed upon seeing his friend. “What are you doing here?”

                Klemens, too, was taken aback at seeing Sasha. “I’m friends with Giuseppina, and you’re…”

                Sasha turned to Leo, and said, “Leo, this is my friend Klemens. Klemens, this is my coworker Leo.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Leo directed at Klemens, holding out his hand. “You’re the Klemens I’ve heard about.”

                Klemens smiled, taking his hand and shaking it. “And you’re the Leo. Is it short for anything?” he asked, referring to Leo’s name. ‘ _God,’_ he thought, perhaps holding onto Leo’s warm, plump hand for a second too long, ‘ _what does he do to maintain this hand softness?’_

                Leo didn’t seem to notice Klemens’s fascination with his hand. “Short for something, but can’t remember what, exactly. By the way, how did you manage to meet Sasha? It’s a feat, really, since he never leaves his apartment.”

                Blushing, Sasha opened his mouth to protest, but Klemens took the question. If Leo could lovingly insult Sasha, then he could too. “I saw him sitting alone in a coffee shop and I decided to talk to him as an act of charity in the name of the Lord.”

                Ignoring the jibes, Sasha turned his attention to Giuseppina, and introduced himself the same.

                “Sasha, Sasha…” Giuseppina tasted the name on her lips. She looked at him. “I’ve heard of you before. Probably from Klemens. Small world.”

                Leo poured them all glasses of wine from a suspicious-looking wine bottle on one of the tables, pouring half of his out and filling the rest with water. He didn’t drink, and this was as much of an exception as he would make to the rule.

                The words “thanks, Leo,” resounded among the three of his companions as he passed them out, and the four decided to sit at the small table in the living room. After watching Klemens clumsily attempt to flirt with Sasha for about fifteen minutes, however, Leo zoned off into his own thoughts.

                Why didn’t Sasha notice that Klemens was so obviously interested in him? With the way he looked, acted, dressed, Leo concluded that there was _no_ way that Sasha was completely heterosexual, so why couldn’t he take a hint? They were compatible. They would be perfect for each other. Leo remembered what it was like to be young and in love with Desirée Clary, his ex-fiancée. And then Joseph had fallen in love with her sister, and everything had gone to utter shit. He waited until he had gotten his master’s to leave the country so that he wouldn’t constantly be reminded of the torment, and finally put an end to it all by compiling his feelings into five drafts. Although he would have written a sixth one, he met _Rose_ immediately after he had finished with his fifth draft, and it seemed like too good an omen to carry on with it. Leo didn’t like the name Rose. He decided to call her by her legal name, Josephine, instead.

                When he jerked himself back into the real world, he caught Giuseppina making faces at him as if to say, “ _Let’s leave they won’t notice,”_ , and so they did and went onto the cold front porch. Neither Sasha nor Klemens noticed either of them move, so smitten they were in conversation.

                Giuseppina swirled her glass of suspicious wine with her finger before taking a small sip and wrinkling her face.  “Do you know where this wine is from?” she asked.

                “No,” replied Leo. “I found it on a table and thought it would be okay. Is it bad?”

                “There’s… there’s better.” She poured the rest of the glass onto the grass, shrugging as if to suggest that there was nothing really wasted.

                “It’s not too bad if you dilute it with water first.”

                “I thought you were French.”

                “I _am_.”

                “No wonder you were exiled,” she said. “Atrocity to civilians.” Leo didn’t say anything. She was right. Although this quiet moment with Giuseppina was _nice_ and everything, he thought, he almost felt a twinge of envy that Sasha had given all of his attention to Klemens instead of to him. No, _envy_ wasn’t the right word. Jealousy would do the trick. He kept talking to Giuseppina, but sensed that neither of them were really paying attention to the conversation; instead, they were both watching the sludge on the road slowly turn into water, both of their minds on autopilot. This was how it always was for them, and Leo never remembered any of their conversations after they were over, but still it was kind of nice.

\---

                As Klemens actually owned a car, Sasha had asked him to drive him home despite the fact that the roads were slippery, they were tired, and Klemens was one of the few truly awful drivers that Sasha had ever met. Every moment of this car ride was a bout of laughter in the face of death. As soon as they both got in the car and had spent about a minute shivering from the frigidity of the interior, Sasha asked Klemens, “Do you like him?”

                Klemens, not really paying attention, didn’t reply immediately; his attention was more focused on backing out of the co-op’s crumbly, dilapidated driveway without losing a tire or hitting anything. He understood why the co-op, with its relatively low rent, had enough money to operate in a generally more expensive part of town: no thought was ever given to fixing anything, no matter how badly it had broken. Once Klemens had finished the great task and had successfully navigated his way onto the road, he thought back to Sasha’s question. “Who?” he asked. “Leo?”

                “Yeah…” mumbled Sasha, already half-asleep.

                Now that he was focused on the road, Klemens’s thoughts cleared up enough to allow him to think properly. He didn’t, he realized, feel anything for Leo one way or the other. The simultaneous lack of like and dislike that the man evoked in him produced a new sensation altogether, but all of this seemed too mean to tell Sasha, whom he desperately _needed_ to like him. He had to pick his words extremely carefully, but he couldn’t think of one that was halfway in between “provocative” and “alluring”. “He’s… he’s captivating.”

                “What do you mean, ‘captivating’? I asked you a yes or no question.”

                “I don’t have a yes or no answer. If you don’t like it, blame law school.”

                “I thought that the practicing law was about being dogmatic.”

                “Someone’s never been to law school.”

                Sasha changed the subject back to the original one. “So you don’t like him?”

                Suddenly, it occurred to Klemens that Sasha wasn’t merely asking him if he liked one of his friends, but was in a way asking for a seal of approval to like Leo. Once again, he had to carefully formulate a response.

                “He’s charming,” he started, and it was unequivocally true. Leo _was_ charming when he wanted to be. “But in a sense that I would never want to be emotionally linked to him.” He hoped that this was getting his point across to Sasha clearly enough. “You understand?”

                “Not really… Klemens, you’re one of the smartest people I know and I trust your opinion, so…”

                He tried again. “I don’t feel anything for him one way or the other except for the obligation to like him because he’s your friend.”

                “Will you at least try?”

                Although Sasha couldn’t see it, Klemens rolled his eyes. “Sure. I mean, he has really soft… hands. After a certain level of hand-softness, it becomes impossible to hate someone.”

                “I wouldn’t be so sure,” replied Sasha. “I mean, your hands are pretty nice, but you’re also the worst thing that’s ever befallen me.”

                “You know what, Sasha?” Klemens asked, slowing the car down to a stop. “You can get out of the car right now and walk yourself home.”

                “I can’t do that, I’ll get _mugged_ ,” he whined. “I thought that you loved me.”

                In a moment of panic, Klemens wondered if Sasha somehow knew that he had feelings for him, and was using now to enunciate the fact that he knew. In a subsequent moment of weakness, he retaliated by saying, “You ‘re not going to get mugged, you just don’t have anyone else to ask for a seal of approval on your crush."            

                Sasha didn’t say anything, but then slowly said, “That chide was _too_ personal, and it really _galls_ me, Klemens.”

                “I’m sorry.”

                “It’s okay. I don’t care enough to hold a grudge against you.”

                “I’m…” 

                “Klemens, I’m gay.” Sasha cringed as he said this, but somehow he also felt as if a great weight was lifted off of his shoulders. He knew that Klemens already knew, but it felt good to say it anyway.

                “Okay.” It was all that Klemens had to say, and it was enough. When, after too long, he finally dropped Sasha off at his apartment, Sasha asked him if he wanted to stay the night because it was cold and dark, but he politely declined.

\---

                When morning came, Klemens instantly regretted the way he’d acted with Sasha yesterday, and the remnants of the last night lingered in his mind as he systematically went through all of his morning tasks. Sasha said that he didn’t care, but of _course_ he cared. Everyone always cared about everything, even if they said they didn’t. Perhaps, he got to thinking, his life would be better if he hadn’t asked Sasha if he was the guy from _La Republique_. Yeah, that was right. He should have been spending all of his mental energy on legal matters and paperwork. Going out occasionally was _maybe_ okay, but he didn’t have time to be spent poring over some twenty-three-year-old who had no idea what he was doing. And there was another reason.

                He didn’t want to think about it, but every time he went into his living room, there it was, sitting dustily and uselessly on top of a pile of unread coffee table books. He had taken it off of his ring finger on the first day that he had moved here, seven months ago, and it had been lying there ever since. He could never tell Sasha about _that_ , either. Klemens wasn’t jealous of Leo for any reason other than that he wasn’t married, and didn’t have to deal with the constant reminder that he was probably the worst husband ever.

                He didn’t want to work today, and the feeling only intensified when he opened his briefcase and saw all of the paperwork he was supposed to do glaring at him, the white sheets reminiscent of the fabric of a funeral shroud. Before uncapping his pen, he went to his kitchen and filled the empty brim of his coffee mug with whiskey.

\---

                When Leo arrived home, there were two letters for him sitting on the kitchen counter where everyone’s mail was always spread out by whoever brought it in.

                ‘ _Two letters!’_ he thought excitedly. Most of his mail had been junk mail before he had moved here, and he was fairly certain that Josephine still had to throw out a few pounds of it every month when it arrived in his name. There was nothing in the world more vindicating than posing a minor inconvenience to someone who had wronged him. It reminded him of the time last August when Hippolyte had glued his favorite pen into its cap, and then ruined his life a mere month later. Everything reminded of him so much that he _couldn’t_ not think about it. The five stages of grief weren’t too clear when he was actually the one grieving. Another reminder that he had been hopelessly rejected was the fact that he had left his letter opener in Josephine’s apartment, having thought that he wouldn’t need it since he rarely used it, anyway.

                Before getting a knife to open the damn envelopes, Leo took a second to truly glance at them. They were French, of course, and the addresses on both had been written in his mother’s spidery handwriting.

                ‘ _Why didn’t she just call me?’_ he wondered, before thinking, ‘ _That’s right, at an extent, it’s cheaper to send letters overseas than to make international calls.’_

                The Bonaparte financial situation wasn’t great right now and hadn’t been anything close to good since Leo’s father died when he was fifteen and left their family of nine penniless. That was just a couple of months before his youngest brother, Jerome, was born, and it had been downhill ever since. Leo had been sending home money every month for the past seven years, and for the last year had been forced to extract the sum from his savings account. Although he loved most of them, he bemoaned the fact that his parents had decided to have eight children without the means to do so. At least, he thought, his all of his siblings could afford to go to university thanks to France’s education system. Still, Jerome _was_ still only fifteen, so that wouldn’t be for a while.

                He sighed as he sliced through the sides of the envelopes with the questionably clean co-op knife, careful that he wouldn’t end up slicing through his finger. It had happened a few weeks ago, and since then he had trained his fingertips to be more careful with knives. He pulled the letter out of the envelope, and upon seeing that it was four full pages long, decided to start with the other one instead. Okay, the other letter was even longer, and it wasn’t in his mother’s handwriting. The former letter, he decided, was probably the prerequisite to reading the latter, so better read this one first.

                He hadn’t seen any written Corsican in years, and had to let his eyes adjust to the paper for a few minutes before he could make any sense of it. Despite living in France, Letitia Ramolino Bonaparte didn’t speak any French and styled herself too old to learn at this point. Still, if she had only spared the effort to write in Italian, it wouldn’t have done any harm. Leo wasn’t entirely opposed to staying in touch with his Corsican roots, but he feared that it would undo all of the effort he had made to assimilate to the French lifestyle and his attempts to gallicize his still very Corsican accent.

                He read the letter.

                Okay, so Giuseppe is still Giuseppe and Luciano is still into the weird political belligerence stuff, and Elisa is doing well in University, she’s studying to be a director, yikes, I have no idea what Luigi is up to, but presumably he has an actual job, Pauline is engaged, wait, isn’t she nineteen? Why didn’t she tell me? I’ll kill him. Caroline, she’s studying the social sciences, good for her, she also told me to leave Josephine for years, doubly good for her, and Jerome is studying the literature. He’s fifteen. Mother says… Mother says that he talks constantly of moving to the United States. Great, then I’ll have someone on the same continent. I miss Jerome. He was only eight when I saw him last, but I doubt that I hold any important place in his heart. Why haven’t I gone back to see my family in the last seven years? Perhaps I should, either this year or the next…

                The letter went on to focus on Caroline, explaining that she had been accepted to the University of Toronto, and that wouldn’t Napoleon look after her in Canada? Never mind that Toronto was seven hours away. Leo wasn’t even aware that anyone in his family knew how to speak English. The next letter was a follow-up penned by Caroline, and said essentially the same thing. He briefly skimmed it before coming to a conclusion.

                _Leo_ was a permanent resident of Canada. There was no way that anyone in the Bonaparte family had enough money to pay for tuition to a university outside of France, no matter what sum Letitia had. If Caroline became Leo’s dependent, then she would qualify to pay her tuition as a Canadian citizen. The question wasn’t whether he would make sure that she was doing fine in this country, but if he would take her in as his dependent.

                He wrote back affirmative immediately and decided to hand in his two weeks’ notice early so that he could spend a week looking at apartments in the city.

\---

                When he walked into work the next day, after punching in and greeting Sasha, he asked, “Do you know if the owner of the establishment is coming by today?”

                Sasha frowned. “Yeah, I mean, he usually comes by right when the store closes, right? Why?”

                Smiling, Leo answered, “I’m handing in my two weeks’ notice.”

                “Really? You found a new job?” Leo nodded, and although Sasha was happy for him, he also felt somewhat melancholy because seeing Leo was one of the only good parts of his job. Other than the free coffee, of course. “Where?”

                “I found a position in the physics center of the university.”

                “When do you start?”

                “In three weeks. I have to spend another week apartment hunting because my sister’s coming to live with me for a year.”

                Sasha frowned again. “I didn’t know you had any siblings.”

                “You wouldn’t believe,” smirked Leo. Yes, he smirked. “I have seven.” He thought that the large number would shock Sasha, but he remained unfazed.

                “I have eight,” he replied, “and the youngest is twenty-one years younger than me.” He wondered what it would be like if Kostya came over to live with him for a year. Probably awful.

                “Yeah, you’ve told me about your brother Kostya before, you said that sometimes you call him just so that he can make you feel bad about yourself.”

                Sasha changed the subject. Fucking Kostya. “So what do you even do in a physics lab?”

                Leo almost laughed. Sasha had noticed that he had been in a better mood for the last few days, and wondered if it was due to the thought of quitting. “It’s mostly looking at the squiggly line and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. That, and a lot of alcoholism.”

                “So what you’re saying is that you’re going to drown your physics sorrows in alcohol.”

                Making a face of disgust, he said, “Of course not! Alcohol is expensive. I’ll drown my sorrows in the coffee that I can get here for free.”

                “What if I don’t give you any free coffee?”

                “I’ll take it as a personal offense and ask Klemens to help me file a restraining order against you with the money I save from not buying coffee.”

                “You can’t do that!” Sasha protested, having accepted long ago that when Leo said he was going to do something, he would usually end up doing it. And because he was still becoming accustomed to Leo’s horribly dry sense of humor, the fact that it was a joke flew completely over his head. “You’re, like, my only two friends.”

                You should leave your house more, then.”

                “Well…”

                “It’s cute when you’re frustrated.”

                “You’re the only person I get frustrated with.”

                Right then, their first customer of the day walked in. Who should it be, Leo thought, but Klemens von Metternich? As Klemens waved to both of them, Sasha called out a greeting, but Leo didn’t pay attention. His mind was fixated on the ring glinting on his left hand.

                ‘ _Klemens,’_ he thought, ‘ _you’re a let-down.’_


	6. Irksome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha's thoughts immediately went from ‘Wow, I finally said it,’ to ‘that was the most inappropriate thing I could have possibly said’. Leo stopped talking, but he didn’t seem to react or even register the fact that anything unusual had happened. He was utterly unreadable. ‘Maybe I didn’t say anything. Maybe I imagined it…’
> 
> Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. After a few seconds of weighty silence, Leo stood up, quickly mumbled, “I have to go”, and disappeared. Sasha watched as he left the scene, but didn’t try to stop him.
> 
> OR
> 
> in which the frequency at which Sasha leaves the house reaches an all-time low

                Sasha set down the small pile of books nestled in the crook of his arm, leaned against the shelf, and sighed. The public library never failed to disappoint him. In a recent development, he had decided to start saving money and shelf-space by not buying any books, but the endeavor had seen a slow start so far. The Russian language section was especially pathetic, and he could have easily set up a better one with the books he already owned. Still, he had to consider, how many people who spoke Russian actually lived in Quebec City? Probably not too many. In his persistent scouring of the place, he had managed to find only a few volumes that he actually found interesting- hidden among them a chick flick romance novel, but he found it impossible to conceive that anyone _actually_ wholeheartedly hated the genre of entertainment fiction.

                He left the library with a negligible amount of extra weight in his satchel, feeling somewhat disappointed in himself. He had been lonelier than ever lately, because Klemens was always busy with lawyer stuff and Leo was equally busy doing leasing stuff and trying to make arrangements for his sister to live with him for a year. He worked his shifts with another twenty-something who, although responsible and polite, bore no interest in Sasha’s friendship. Sasha supposed that it was better, after all, to keep work relationships strictly professional.

                He was still intimately and utterly smitten with Leo, but he never let any of it actually get to his thoughts. In fact, he hadn’t consciously done anything to pursue Leo at all at this point. He wasn’t an idiot; the man was still dealing with copious amounts of bad blood from his last partner and had everything else important to do which didn’t involve him. Anyway, Sasha thought bitterly, trying to pursue a straight guy had never worked in the past and it probably wouldn’t now, either. Actually, he didn’t know if Leo was completely straight. There was something about him which seemed distinctly flamboyant, but he mentioned something about having a fiancée and then he was with Josephine for seven years, so he didn’t really know. Leo was the opposite of what he would ever call affectionate, but Sasha was happy to have his friendship nonetheless.

                And then there was Klemens. Sasha didn’t have many friends, but neither did Klemens in Quebec City, so both of them thought it to be a stroke of great luck when they struck up a conversation on that day a few months ago. Increasingly, however, Sasha found that he could never tell what Klemens was thinking, but Klemens could always read him like the glossy pages in the legal textbooks he seemed to own an overabundance of. And increasingly, Sasha couldn’t find the boundary between friendly affection and sexual tension in their relationship. Even Sasha, the ever-oblivious Sasha, was slowly coming onto the fact that his best friend was harboring feelings for him. In an ironic twist of fate, he had no idea how to maintain a casual friendly relationship with someone who so conspicuously wanted him. The only conclusion he could come to was that he needed more than two friends. Easier said than done. _Tabernak_.

                Sasha generally hadn’t had too many _friends_ in Russia, and the same carried through even here. He had had people whom he would talk to, but he always had a pinprick of dislike for them in his heart which prevented him from developing any meaningful relationships with them. It was too hard to make friends as an adult, especially in this country where his accent gave him away as a stranger to everyone he met. He was an immigrant, Leo was an immigrant, and Klemens was an immigrant, so he supposed that he would just have to befriend another immigrant. Again, easier said than done.

\---

                If there was three words that Leo could use to describe Sasha, they were “kind of dumb”. It wasn’t so much of a negative thing as it was a truth; he was just kind of dumb, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. Josephine had been _more_ than kind of dumb, and Leo loved her nonetheless. There were lots of people in the world who were kind of dumb, and he didn’t think any less of them for it. However, he found, people who possessed the “kind of dumb” quality tended to make up for it with something else. Josephine had managed to compensate for her lack of intelligence by being an artful slut, and that _definitely_ hadn’t been a bad thing. Anyway, he was struggling with the impending feeling that Sasha would fuck him over someday, but brushed it off given his background of constant paranoia. What was the worst that Sasha could do? He was kind of dumb.

                Leo had been thinking about Sasha more and more lately but he wasn’t sure that it was a good thing. He had begun to _burn_ with pent-up sexual frustration, which was the more concerning thing. He didn’t want his sexual considerations to mesh with his Sasha-related thoughts and ruin everything. And yet.

                Leo couldn’t bring himself to think about it any further. He tried to convince himself that he wasn’t actually attracted to Sasha. Of _course_ he wasn’t. He would probably do it with Hippolyte Charles if presented the opportunity right now. After all, although his relationships in the past had been chiefly with women, it wasn’t as if he had never done anything with men. He had gone to an all-male boarding school! It was bound to happen at some point. The last time he had done such a thing, however, was when he had been an edgy suicidal teenager and halfheartedly seduced that American exchange student. For thirteen years now, he had had a smooth sail on the sea of heterosexuality and hadn’t looked back once. Much to his dismay, he could now visualize the coastline coming closer and closer.

                He groaned. Along with the coastline of homosexuality, he could also see his thirties edging in closer and closer, and although he wasn’t looking forward to that decade, he hoped it would be whatever the last one hadn’t been. Between fleeing France and starting a new life in Canada, spending seven years with a woman who had never actually loved him and being in a perpetual state of broke-ness, he hadn’t had a chance to live his life as much as he had hoped. When he was a teenager and his thoughts were constantly occupied with a Wertherian longing for death, he didn’t think he would make it this far.

                So, he thought now, he might as well get involved with Sasha, not only because he didn’t have anything better to do right now, but because even their relationship now wouldn’t last forever. Leo had planned to stay somewhere in Québec for the rest of his life when he took the citizenship oath of Canada in both languages, but from the start Sasha had made it _very_ clear that he wanted to go back to Russia sometime in his twenties and more recently had considered pursuing a degree at some point. It was all very vague, but it still set up some point in time when they wouldn’t be together anymore. Leo decided that “kind of dumb” weren’t the exact words he would use to describe Sasha, but instead naïve and inexperienced. After all, he had been raised by his grandmother in St. Petersburg in an old-money family. He had never had to do any of the unsightly things which gave life a sense of structural integrity. If a single card slipped, the rest of the pile would collapse on top of it.

                Well, then, Leo decided, he would have to have the upper hand over Sasha on when their relationship expired if any of this was to happen. He could pull out a card as well as anyone else could, but he would have to set the house up first. Nothing he could do now, after all, would give Sasha any sense of purpose or ambition. And then, once he was done, he could break Sasha’s fledgling heart. It would all work out, at least for himself.            

\---

                Leo never wanted to return to La Republique ever again, but he felt compelled to break the news to Sasha. He hadn’t seen him for the better part of a week which didn’t seem like much, but felt like years given that they were used to spending hours together every day. Leo didn’t know what he expected, but the place looked exactly the same as the last time that he had seen it. It had the paintings on the walls which weren’t worth giving second glances to, bar stools, and the stereotypical coffee shop music that didn’t seem to exist outside of the realm of coffee.

                And, of course, there was Sasha, the fixture of the establishment.

                He walked in the place about fifteen minutes before the place closed, so there was nobody inside except for Sasha, who had become responsible for locking up. Aggravated, he turned around to see which _asshole_ had walked in right before closing time, but softened his features considerably when he saw Leo.

                “Leo!” he called out, shutting down a machine. “What are you doing here? You quit, remember?” His voice was tinged with a fake bitterness.

                “Really? I thought I still worked here,” replied Leo nonchalantly as he walked to the counter.

                “What have you been up to?” Sasha decided to close early and locked the front doors when he finished doing everything else. He and Leo sat at one of the rare comfortable tables in the back of the store as they chatted.

                “Early retirement. Painting fruit, leasing an apartment…”

                “You leased an apartment in _three_ days?”

                “Nobody else wanted it; after all, it’s right next to Arthur Wellesley’s.”

                Sasha leaned forward. “That is _rich.”_

                Leo continued. “I had never actually leased an apartment before today. Josephine always renewed ours.”

                Josephine! Sasha hadn’t heard a word about her from Leo in a long, _long_ time. He didn’t know whether this meant that Leo was trying to open up to him or whether it meant that he was in the stages of recovery, but knowing Leo it probably meant neither. He admitted to himself then and there that he didn’t really understand the other man at all.

                Meanwhile, Leo was thinking, ‘ _If I pretend to open up to Sasha, will he finally confess his love for me?’_

                Sasha spoke his mind. “I haven’t heard that name in a long, _long_ time.”

                Appearing to think about it, Leo said, “I’m moving past her.”

                “You were together for seven years and it’s only been three months.”

                “I assure you, Sasha, I know the facts.”

                “Isn’t that… kind of fast?”

                “I don’t like to dwell over losses.”

                “But… aren’t you still in love with her?”

                Leo winced. “Sasha…”

                Realizing that he had overstepped his boundaries, he apologized. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

                “It’s fine.” Leo hadn’t expected his chance to win Sasha over to come so fast. He continued, “Sasha, you love someone when you think you understand them, at least to some extent, and when you really understand someone, they become a part of…” He didn’t finish his sentence.

                “Leo, I’m in love with you,” Sasha interjected. His thoughts immediately went from ‘ _Wow, I finally said it_ ,’ to ‘ _that was the most inappropriate thing I could have possibly said’._ Leo stopped talking, but he didn’t seem to react or even register the fact that anything unusual had happened. He was utterly unreadable. ‘ _Maybe I didn’t say anything. Maybe I imagined it…’_

                Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. After a few seconds of weighty silence, Leo stood up, quickly mumbled, “I have to go”, and disappeared. Sasha watched as he left the scene, but didn’t try to stop him.

\---

                As Sasha walked home, he felt increasingly worse due to both the cold and the scene that he had made with Leo.

                ‘ _Dieu,’_ he angrily thought, ‘ _I’m so stupid. I’ve lost one of my only friends, been rejected, and been humiliated all in one move!’_ If only he could take back the last hour, the last twenty minutes! A lifetime’s worth of warm feelings left him as he realized that Leo never _had_ to see him again, and that that interview was probably the last time that they would ever be friends. Sasha had been terrified of rejection from the start, but this was something so much worse.

                Sasha had left his life behind and moved halfway across the world, but still this was the first time that he felt that anything he did had any level of permanence. Permanence! Leo might know a thing or two about permanence, but it wasn’t as if he could ask him at this point. It had only taken a handful of words for Sasha’s spirits to fall into utter disrepair, and yet wasn’t even a substantial enough heartbreak for him to feel anything except for loneliness and confusion.  He wanted to call Kostya in Russia and tell him that he had been right all along about his entire good-for-nothing crush, but he couldn’t bear to hear the sneer in his brother’s voice. If these were the elastic years, then why did every part of him feel so leaden?

                When he finally arrived home, he didn’t bother to follow his usual routine of making tea; instead, he sat in his living room and thought about nothing. He could call Klemens, but he doubted that Klemens would be of any help right now. He had never noticed how dusty this room was; in fact, dust had accumulated on everything since he had started visiting the library. Library! Nothing seemed to torment him enough.

                He fell asleep with cold fingers and nothing to warm them.

\---

                An angry knocking on the door startled Sasha awake, and the frigid air of his apartment did nothing to lull him back to sleep. Checking his watch, he saw that he had been asleep for thirteen hours. He was triply startled awake when he realized that this meant he had missed the start of today’s early shift, but whatever. Mental health day.

                He had a pretty good idea who was repeatedly slamming his door at 7 AM. When he finally trudged and opened the thing, he rubbed his eyes, allowing them to adjust to the light, and said, “Klemens, why are you… what are you doing here?”

                “I called you fifteen times but you didn’t pick up, so I wanted to see if you were okay.” Whenever Klemens called and the other person didn’t answer, he took it as a sign to call over and over again until they did. He examined Sasha more carefully. “You look like a wreck.”

                “I _am_ a wreck. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

                Klemens yawned. “I don’t have to go to work today, if that’s what you’re asking.”

                Sasha did have anything interesting to add, so he said, “Okay, cool,” and the two spent a few moments staring at each other. “Do you want to come in?” he finally asked, opening his door.

                “Sure.” Klemens stepped inside and hung his coat on the back of the door. Sasha closed it behind him.

                “You don’t have to come by every time I don’t pick up my cell phone…”

                “Well, something is clearly wrong, so my intuition wasn’t exactly incorrect.”

                Frowning, Sasha protested, “Nothing is _wrong_. I don’t mind the fact that you’re here, I’m just vexed that you think that I can’t take care of myself.”

                “I _never_ said that I don’t…”

                “I have a job! I pay my own taxes! I can take care of myself!” he exclaimed, and then grumbled, “Nobody _ever_ treats me like I’m an actual adult.”

                Klemens thought, ‘ _Well, they’re not wrong…’_ , but Sasha’s naivete was part of what endeared him so deeply to the other man. It gave him a vibrant youthful air. Wait... this was exactly what Sasha didn’t like.

               Sasha continued, " _And I'm sick of it!"_

                “Is this seriously what you’ve been losing sleep over?” Klemens asked. The two were still standing awkwardly in Sasha’s doorway, neither paying attention to the frigidity of the room.

                “I haven’t been losing sleep. I've been getting too much of it, if anything.”

                “Don’t get offended,” Klemens said, “but is this about L-”

                “No!” exclaimed the very-deep-in-denial Sasha. Fucking liar, thought Klemens. There was no way that this wasn’t about Leo. After a few seconds of pause, he retracted his statement, and with a sigh, admitted, “Yeah, it is.”

                “Do you want to talk about it?” the Austrian asked, leaning back on Sasha’s door.

                “Over tea.”

\---

                Sasha felt awkward talking about his rejection to Klemens, whom he knew had some level of feeling for him, but he felt that after having dealt with all of his shit for a while now, Klemens had a right to know. He kept it short and sweet.

                “We chatted for a bit,” he said, “and then he said something about Josephine, and I asked him if he still loved her, which was overstepping my boundaries, but he responded with some long spiel about how you love someone when you think that you understand them and I absentmindedly interjected by saying ‘ _I’m in love with you’_ and then he said ‘ _I have to leave’_ and left.”

                “Who’s Josephine?” Klemens asked, slightly confused.

                “His ex of seven years who also cheated on him for seven years and with whom he separated a few months ago,” explained Sasha.

                Klemens twisted his wedding band on his finger underneath the table. He didn’t know how to tell Sasha that he fucked up beyond repair without being mean about it. “You fucked up beyond repair.”

                “I know. I don’t care anymore.” Despite Sasha’s attempt to be casual about it, some tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away. “It’s fine,” he insisted. “I don’t care.”

                Klemens felt a small stab of pain from seeing Sasha heartbroken over another man. ‘ _I could do so much better than Leo.’_ He had no idea how to console Sasha. “Sasha, it’s okay to be upset about things like this…” Sasha, however, kept insisting that he wasn’t fazed at all, and that was the end of it. Who was Klemens to tell him that he wasn’t sufficiently in touch with his emotions? Furthermore, who was Klemens to tell Sasha how to handle his presumably first instance of rejection? He was in a position in which he couldn’t offer any advice without offending him.

                If Sasha insisted, he could figure this thing out on his own.

\---

                A week passed, but Sasha didn’t feel any better; if anything, he felt worse and worse. He fell deeper into his pit of loneliness, yet didn’t feel any motivation to go into society or try to meet anyone new. The last time he had approached someone for friendship, after all, had brought him to this state. His depression became a system of positive feedback: the longer he went without seeing anyone, the less he wanted to see anyone, and the worse he felt. His only respite was in the fact that rejection was universal.

                He almost wished that he had someone else to blame for his own mistake. He wanted _so badly_ to resent Leo, but he couldn’t; if recovering from a relatively small rejection caused Sasha this much strife, he couldn’t imagine seven years of it systematically dumped on anyone. He didn’t blame himself for having feelings for Leo, either, but for being stupid enough to admit it. A week ago he had angrily denounced others for seeing him as inexperienced and green, but the more he thought about, the more they were right. He didn’t know exactly who _they_ were, but they were correct.

                It had been dark outside for a few hours, but he sat reading in the dim lamplight of his dusty living room when he heard a knock on his front door. Dreading the thought of answering it, he only sunk deeper into his chair. Well, he decided, he would at least see whoever had been courteous enough to visit him at 9 PM at night but only bother to answer it if it was Klemens. He was a lousy friend, and wasn’t sure why Klemens even bothered to talk to him anymore. Klemens was young and attractive and had a well-paying job and a sexy accent, so he could _easily_ find better company. God, Klemens…

                Sasha heard another, more thoughtful knock on the door a few seconds later. He finally got up to open it, setting his copy of _Werther_ down with the pages open on the bottom and stretching. ‘ _Oh, Klemens…’_ he thought as he trudged to the door.

Well, he thought as he looked through the tiny hole in the door, it most certainly wasn’t Klemens. Another knock. He sighed, and resigned himself to answer it. After all, how bad could this possibly be after the hell week that he had just lived through? He rested his hand on the doorknob and slowly, slowly opened it.

                “Leo,” he said unenthusiastically, not offering a real greeting. The last person he wanted to see! “What are you doing here?”

                “I work nearby,” Leo answered, “so I wanted to see how you were doing.” He had updated his look to include a red coat instead of a black one, and it almost complemented his sunlight-deprived skin.

                “Fantastic,” answered Sasha in the same monotonous voice.

                “What have you been up to?”

                “I was reading _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ until you knocked on my door.” Sasha’s hand was still on his inside doorknob, which he clutched tightly. “Well, re-reading. You know Werther”

                “It’s my favorite.”

                “So we _do_ have something in common.” There was the snark; it was so much easier to blame Leo for his problems when he was actually here.

                Now, Leo began stretching for something to talk about other than the elephant in the room. “Have you done anything else?” he asked.

                “To be frank, I haven’t left my apartment to do anything but work for the last week. I’ve been feeling kind of down, kind of depressed, et cetera.”

                “Is it because of me?”

                “Of course not,” answered Sasha, doing a half-eye roll. He finally opened his door completely. Still unenthusiastically, he said, “Come in, you sound like this will take a while.” Although he felt somewhat insulted by Sasha’s utter lack of everything, Leo complied.

                “Don’t hang your coat up,” Sasha added, “we’re doing this on the balcony.”

                Leo had been here many times, but he had never actually been on Sasha’s balcony before. It wasn’t particularly nice other than the fact that he had bothered to put a couple of chairs out on it. Occasionally, a car passed by, illuminated by the streetlamps. Once Sasha actually went outside, however, he gained some of his energy back.

                “Why are you here?” he demanded of Leo.

                “I wanted to see you,” replied Leo as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

                “What do you want from me?”

                In response, Leo took two steps over to Sasha, pulled him down by his shirt, and gently kissed him. When he pulled away from Sasha two seconds later, Sasha was so fazed that he forgot why he was upset with Leo in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> appropriate time 2 embed this image


	7. Ab Imo Pectore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every time Sasha had tried to get a hint at how Leo felt about him, Leo had given him hollow, ambivalent answers. That was the word that he would use to describe the way that Leo acted around him time and time again: ambivalent. He wondered what had happened to so thoroughly divert Leo from the man he had beena year ago, the man who had been so in love with being in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it has been long time no chapter.

                After the kiss was over, Sasha looked down and couldn’t help but snicker when he noticed that Leo was practically on his toes. He gestured to the space between himself and Leo. “This has to be at _least_ a twenty-centimeter height difference,” he noted.

                “You’re just a giant,” Leo retorted instantly.

                “Believe it or not,” Sasha said, “I’m the short one in the family. My great-something was two hundred and ten centimeters tall. They say he tore a man’s beard out with his bare hands, and…” He wondered why he was saying all of this; of _course_ he had had his awkward moments in the past, but this was just too undignified.

                Leo gently stroked Sasha’s cold face, turning away briefly as a car went by. “Sasha, are you nervous?” he asked.

                “A little.”

                “Why are you nervous?” He was standing so close to Sasha that he could feel Sasha’s warmth radiating onto him. Tall people were good substitutes for heaters.

                In response, Sasha tried to kiss Leo again. He ended up aiming too far to the left and awkwardly pulled away instead of trying to re-center. ‘ _That’s it,’_ he thought. He could hear his own heartbeat. ‘ _That was fun while it lasted but now Leo is_ never _going to talk to you again.’_

                To his surprise, however, Leo laughed a little bit at Sasha’s failure. “No wonder you’re nervous,” he commented. “You’re awful at this!”

                “What do you expect? I haven’t kissed anyone since I was fourteen.”

\---

                It was now 22:30, and as usual, Sasha had made tea because Leo couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. The two were on Sasha’s dusty living room sofa, the lamp still dimly lighting the space. Other than the dust, Leo noted, this place looked like nobody had ever actually lived in it. Everything had been arranged so meticulously that it looked as if the room had existed in this condition since the beginning of time. The only thing that functioned a symbol of life was Sasha’s face-down copy of _Werther_ and the two empty teacups on the coffee table. He was leaning against Sasha’s shoulder, and Sasha ran his wiry fingers through his hair repeatedly. He knew that this was an utterly feigned intimacy, but still it made him think that if time froze in his exact moment, he might have been satisfied.

                His sense of satisfaction slightly waned when Sasha asked him if he wanted to talk about Josephine.

                “No, I really don’t,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

                “Are you still in love with her?”

                Leo merely answered, “She’s not a part of my life anymore.”

                Sasha didn’t know what to make of the sheer forlorn-ness of his response. He resigned himself to asking the simple question. “What do you want, Leo?”

                He didn’t actually know. He was hoping that whatever he wanted would come to him naturally, but for once, it didn’t. “I want whatever _you_ want from me.” It didn’t make sense, he knew, but it sounded right in the moment.

                “But I just want _you_ ,” admitted Sasha. He decided that he could trust Leo with his feelings. “I don’t know how any of this works. I don’t even know if you actually like me or not.”

“Of course I like you.” It was true; Leo wanted to do unspeakable things to Sasha, but he _did_ like him, if nothing else.

                “I don’t know if you’ll like me once you’re done with me.” Before Leo could open his mouth to respond, he continued, “I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never been really involved with anyone else, much less another man.”

                “Really?”

                “I’ve only ever had girlfriends. One girlfriend. Singular. When I was fourteen. I mean, have you?”

                Leo now spoke with a softer tone. “I went to an all-boys boarding school. It was a petri dish of homosexuality. The only time I did anything serious was with some American guy when I was sixteen, so thirteen years ago.” He paused. “I don’t even remember his name.” It was a lie, of course, but he didn’t really _want_ to remember that pathetic experience.

                “You had sex with him and you don’t even remember his name?” Sasha spoke with a distinguished tone of scrutiny.

                “He was good at what he did, and there was nothing else about him worth remembering.”

                Sighing, Sasha said, “My conservative Russian family would never have accepted me for this, so I just never told anyone anything and it worked out fine. They, especially my grandmother, just assumed that I was awkward with girls and that I would grow out of it eventually. I never pursued anyone like I was expected to. The only person who knows that I have… homosexual inclinations… is my brother Kostya.”

                ‘ _He can’t even bring himself to say that he’s gay. He just dances around it.’_ “I understand. Everyone in my family desperately hated Josephine and told me not to see her from the start.” Despite his story, Leo almost smiled. “They didn’t like her because she was six years older than me, far more experienced, and of _course_ had to be using me.”

                “This was when you were…”

                “Twenty-three. After I had already been engaged once.” If not for romance, Leo found no phases to cleanly split his life into. The people he had known had overlapped throughout his time in Corsica, boarding school, university, Paris, and Quebec, but he always felt as if he had deeply changed as a person every time a layer of the rose tint on his life was wiped off. As he was no longer the only boy in an all girls’ nursery school and fabulously infatuated with the young Italian girl named Giacominetta, he had outgrown the versions of himself which made love to shady American boys and seduced prostitutes by the Louvre and fell into pits of fiery stupor for both Desirée and Josephine. He certainly wasn’t in love with Sasha, but he had fallen into a sense of fascination with him in the wake of his love for Josephine.

                As the words left his mouth, Sasha turned and began to kiss him again, and he wished that both of them weren’t wearing so many clothes. He parted his lips slightly and felt Sasha’s tongue meet his own after a few seconds. Sasha clearly had no idea what he was doing, but Leo went with it anyway. He slowly leaned into the other man more and more, until they fell into a comfortable rhythm.

                Leo wasn’t expecting it in the least when Sasha suddenly pushed him away from himself, wide-eyed. Before Leo could say anything, Sasha stared at the ground and whispered, “ _Klemens isn’t going to like this one bit.”_

\---

                “So he’s in love with you?” asked Giuseppina. She stared up at the newly-fixed light in the co-op living room which stood out from all of the others in its brightness.

                Leo sighed. “Utterly smitten.”

\---

                Despite everything, Sasha was actually _not_ utterly smitten with Leo. If he could quantify how smitten he was, exactly, he would estimate himself to be about seventy-five percent smitten and twenty-five percent confused and frustrated. He had forgotten his confused-ness with Leo in a moment of pure ecstasy he had found while kissing him, but the encounter gave him nothing more than he already had. He always felt lonely when Leo left, but this time he just felt empty. He thought that he had accomplished so much when he was with the other man, but it was only after the fact that he realized that he had done nothing at all. Every time he had tried to get a hint at how Leo felt about him, Leo had given him hollow, ambivalent answers. In the end, all that had really happened was that they had exchanged a few rather savory kisses. There was nothing less and nothing more. That was the word that Sasha would use to describe the way that Leo acted around him time and time again: _ambivalent_. Equivocal. Every time he gave the mere sign of favoring Sasha, he turned around and nullified it immediately afterward. He wondered what had happened to so thoroughly divert Leo from the man he had met a year ago, the man who had been so in love with being in love.

                Still, Sasha was in love himself, and he didn’t think that there was anything he could do about it. Sasha’s love happened to be the most unadulterated form of it. He couldn’t specify anything that he loved about Leo if he tried. He didn’t want anything from him. He was just content in being able to love Leo, regardless of what Leo felt about him.

                So why had he wasted one of their intimate moments together for Klemens? Something about Klemens kept him from devoting his thoughts completely to Leo, and while he didn’t particularly appreciate it at times, he felt that Klemens’s common sense had merged with his own. Even when he wasn’t there, Klemens discouraged him from wanting to be with Leo. Sasha was unsure whether it would be better to listen to Klemens or to ignore him, so he decided to stay in the middle of the road and keep all of his advice in the back of his mind. He didn’t _want_ to be skeptical of Leo, per se, but until he understood his true intentions he figured that skepticism couldn’t do anything to hurt him.

\---

                The next day, Leo chatted up Jean-Jacques Cambacérès as he waited for some equipment to finish being moved into the laboratory. In the past week, Leo had gotten accustomed to the atmosphere and people of his new workspace well enough, and there were enough people that he didn’t have to see Arthur here _and_ at the co-op extensively. This was _so_ much better than working at _La Republique_ ; he had flexible hours, didn’t have to actively deal with his boy thing, and worked in his actual field. Above all, he was thankful that differential equations held a place in his life again. He even looked forward to the future, because it contained the eventual day when he would finish working under someone else and apply for a grant to conduct his own research.

                Leo generally liked Jean-Jacques, despite the man’s overly flamboyant inclinations at times. He thought of him as, quite frankly, the gayest man whom he had ever met. He kept company solely among other bachelors, and made no effort whatsoever to conceal the fact. Anyway, this was twenty-first century Quebec, so it wasn’t as if anyone would have had a problem with it. Leo enjoyed his company not only because he was personable and diligent, but kept a good reputation among everyone who knew him.

                Standing in Jean-Jacques’s mostly glass office, Leo watched a woman wheel a cart with some empty boxes on it towards the outside door. He leaned against the other man’s desk. “Do you know if Arthur is coming by today?” he asked nonchalantly.

                Jean-Jacques looked towards Leo and pushed up his glasses by the bridge. “Are you planning on avoiding him?”

                Leo pretended to be offended. “Of course not!” he huffed, even though that was exactly what he was planning on doing. “I saw him this morning and we’re usually here at the same time, so this is a bit abnormal.” Arthur had been showing his face more and more around the co-op as of late, and Leo had grown mixed feelings about him; Arthur had been nothing but courteous to him ever since they had had that awfully shaky introduction, but there was still a tension between them that Leo couldn’t place as awkwardness or rivalry. Jean-Jacques gave him an inquisitive look as he said that he had seen him this morning, so he elaborated. “I live in the same… building as his girlfriend, so I see him quite often.” He was hesitant to use the word “co-op”, lest someone find out about his shameful living conditions.

                “I think he should be around here soon, because he’s seriously considering applying to a PhD program and made an appointment to discuss it with me first.” He paused. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.”

                Definitely rivalry. Leo dearly wished that he had had enough of a head on his shoulders when he had earned his degrees in physics and mathematics to immediately pursue a PhD instead of waiting and ultimately forfeiting his opportunity. Now, with a job and Canadian citizenship and a family to support, even he understood that this was where he met his boundaries. Fucking Arthur. Leo liked nothing about him, right down to his Irish accent.

                Two seconds later, the man himself walked into Jean-Jacques’s office, presumably for the aforementioned reason. His eyes immediately darted from Jean-Jacques’s desk to Leo. “Good morning, Mr. Cambacérès, Leo,” he greeted. There was nothing in his voice to suggest that he carried any sort of disdain for Leo, but it was there all the same.

\---

                On his way home, Leo desperately wished that it was summertime and warm enough to walk along the old fortifications of the city, but it wasn’t, so he decided to maybe stop for some free coffee and go home. He had realized a while ago that walking around Canada in the middle of winter was not a great idea, and had given in to taking the RTC wherever he wanted to go. Unfortunately, now was part of the few weeks of the year when the city was flooded with tourists in accordance with the _Carnaval de Québec_. He supposed that it was a pleasant enough tradition which greatly stimulated the local economy, if not a bit inconvenient. One of his nicer memories of this city was going to see all of the ice sculptures with Josephine when he had first come here five years ago, and… right. She wasn’t a part of his life anymore. The thought brushed away more easily than he thought it would, and he got back to thinking about the city fortifications as he stood and tried not to fall whenever anyone pulled the link for the bus to stop.

                He ended up deciding that the co-op’s coffee was good enough for him, pulled the link five minutes later, and walked the rest of the way to the shabby house. When he walked through the living room to get to the kitchen, he saw that someone had put the “marijuana” flag back up. ‘ _I can’t wait to move out,’_ he thought as he tore it down again and threw it in the trash. It wasn’t as if he had anything against people who smoked; it was just tacky interior design, which he couldn’t stand.

                Surprisingly, Antoine seemed to be out of the house because he wasn’t hanging around the kitchen area, and Giuseppina wasn’t here, either. He had lived here for months, he realized, and barely knew any of his other housemates other than the fact that they presumably existed and liked to smoke marijuana.

                When he went back to his mostly-barren room, he drew open the blinds on the window and stared at the road ahead of him. It was the same as it had been for the last month, snow and all. Everything seemed to him to be perfectly still, and he closed the blinds again; there was no point to having them open if it would be getting dark so soon, anyway.

                What to do, what to do? His lease started in a week and he might have considered packing all of his belongings now is he didn’t have so few in the first place. Now that he actually had a job and a lease, he couldn’t think of any work that he had left to do except… Celebrate, he supposed. After considering it for a second, he reached over his desk to text Sasha, Antoine, and Giuseppina, “ _Let’s play cards at seven.”_ He texted Sasha again. “ _Bring licorice powder.”_

\---

                At exactly seven, Leo opened the door of the co-op to see a red-cheeked Sasha without any licorice powder. Without offering a greeting, Sasha stepped inside and said, “I didn’t know where to find licorice powder. I didn’t even know that it existed before a few hours ago.”

                In response, Leo pinched the younger man’s ears and kissed his nose. “It’s okay,” he replied. “I haven’t been able to find any licorice powder in the five years I’ve lived here.” He led Sasha back to the living room, Sasha remarking that he certainly seemed to be in a good mood today.

                In the year and four months that Sasha had known Leo, he had seen him in good moods, but never truly contented as he was now. He had met Leo, after all, in the midst of a deep depression and become close to him over another depression, so now was also the first time that he had seen anything in Leo’s life going well. He couldn’t believe that it was just yesterday that he sulkily sat in his apartment reading _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ and listened to Leo even more sulkily describe his past sexual escapades. He found it impossible that anything bad could have existed between them just yesterday when Leo was happy.

                Inside the co-op living room, Sasha saw Antoine, Giuseppina, and what-was-his-name(?) gathered around the small table, what-was-his-name-again holding a deck of cards. Everyone had a small glass of wine before them.

                He heard a small chorus of “Hey, Sasha,” before he and Leo both sat in their designated spots and they all prepared to play cards.

                “What are we playing?” Sasha asked, looking around. This room was much _much_ cleaner than the last time he saw it, and the lights weren’t broken anymore.

                “ _Vingt-et-un_ ,” answered Antoine as he took a small sip of wine.

                “I’ve never heard of it.”

                “You can learn how to play as we go along.” Antoine took a small sip of the beverage in front of him and whispered, “ _This is really shitty wine.”_

                “I know,” said Leo, “that’s why I gave it to you.” A laugh went around the table, and Sasha heard someone say, “Arthur, deal the cards.”

\---

                Leo usually didn’t drink, and on the rare occasion when he did, he mixed his wine with water so that it had no real effect on him. After the bottle of wine was through, however, the others had opened some more bottles with higher alcohol content, and the effects were starting to show through. Leo didn’t mind; in fact, he almost liked being around drunk people, _especially_ when he was playing cards.

                “ _Hey, Leo_ ,” Sasha whispered into Leo’s ear, just a little bit tipsy. He was sitting next to Leo, and had been gently gripping his leg for about an hour now. “ _How have you won three games already?”_

                “Experience,” answered Leo, “and skill.”

                Upon overhearing Sasha’s query to Leo, Giuseppina spoke up as well. “Yeah, Leo, how _have_ you won three games already?” she asked. She and Arthur were sharing a blanket for the coldness in the room.

                “You must be really good at this,” Antoine added, dealing everyone another hand of cards. “I’ve only played this game a few times before, so it makes sense…”

                “What can I say? I’ve played countless hands of this game in my lifetime. I prefer it to all other card games.” He remained nonchalant throughout this entire discussion until Arthur sighed and chimed in and said, “Can’t any off you see that he’s been cheating for the past three rounds?” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

                Sasha whispered into Leo’s ear again and moved his hand slightly up Leo’s thigh. “ _You cheat at cards, don’t you, Leo?”_

                Somberly shaking his head, Leo answered, “I assure you that I’ve been playing fair this whole time.”

                The game progressed, and as everyone paid more and more attention to Leo, it became increasingly evident that he was cheating. He swiped a glance at other players’ cards here and intentionally misplaced cards there, but no one bothered to call him out on it again because watching him so tactlessly cheat was more amusing than the game itself could have ever been. He intentionally lost the fourth game to prevent further accusations of cheating. By the end of the fifth one, everyone was tired and drunk and ready to retire for the night.

                As Leo put the cards back into their box and carried everyone’s wineglasses to the sink, Antoine, Giuseppina, and Arthur _insisted_ that it wasn’t safe for Sasha to go home and that he should spend the night at the co-op.

                “Sasha,” Giuseppina said to him, “you’re drunk, wouldn’t have anyone with you, and it’s cold and dark outside. You’ll either get mugged or pass out in an ice bank and die of hypothermia.” She spoke in such an impassioned manner that there were tears in her eyes.

                When Antoine spoke, his words slurred together. He clutched Sasha’s hand for dear life as he added “Yeah, yeah, I’ll even lend you clothes. I _know_ you’re from Russia but seriously, you will die.” It didn’t take very many swipes at Sasha dying alone in the cold for him to agree, and when Leo came back into the living room, Antoine pushed Sasha towards him with the words, “ _Leo, Sasha’s sleeping with you.”_ Giuseppina and Arthur both cringed at his words, but nobody had yet filled him in on the fact that Leo and Sasha had a thing.

                Leo didn’t bat an eyelid. “Sounds good.”

\---

                That night, few words were exchanged between Sasha and Leo as the two of them, a bit too close together for either of their comfort, tried to sleep.

                “ _Hey, Leo?”_ Sasha mumbled into Leo’s ear. Leo was still awake, but didn’t say anything. He was trying to get accustomed to the feeling of Sasha’s perennially cold hands on his torso. “ _You’re awful at cards.”_

                Despite himself, Leo smiled, even though Sasha couldn’t see it. When he was tired, his accent seemed to wrap itself around his a little more intensely, but his articulateness remained steady. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I _only_ play fairly.”

                It was another lie, of course, and Leo didn’t try to sound as if it was the truth this time, but Sasha didn’t catch on to anything he said. In fact, he barely even noticed that Leo had said anything at all. His mind was instead occupied with his dear impressions of Klemens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my favorite quote from Klemens von Metternich is probably "There is a wide sweep about my mind. I am always above and beyond the preoccupations of most public men. I can cover a ground much vaster than they can see. I cannot keep myself from saying about twenty times a day: ‘How right I am, and how wrong they are."
> 
> he was honestly such a douchebag in real life but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	8. And You Thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Did you know that Klemens is married?” Sasha asked.
> 
> "I did," Leo answered nonchalantly.
> 
> “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> >:)

                Two months passed.

                Sasha woke up in Leo’s warm bed to the sound of his work alarm and the observation that Leo had woken up long ago.

                ‘ _Oh my god,’_ he thought, getting up and stretching out his limbs. He had accidentally left so many clothes here over the last two months that Leo had devoted one of his drawers to housing all of them. He had forgotten to turn his alarm off because he didn’t have to work today, but once he was awake, he was awake for good. As he dressed himself, he accidentally pulled open one of the wrong drawers and absentmindedly reached around in its contents before he accidentally clenched a small box, realized that it wasn’t his, and shut the drawer again. _Right_. That was Leo’s drawer of old things that he didn’t need anymore but kept around anyway. Now that his mind had clenched onto the thought of Leo, he wondered where he had gone. It was early enough in the morning that it was still dark outside, and it wasn’t as if he had anywhere to be at this hour, anyway.

                God, it was _cold_. For someone who claimed to hate cold weather so much, Sasha considered Leo notorious for never turning his thermostat above fifteen degrees. When he put on a sweater and went to Leo’s kitchen area, he saw the other man half-awake, squinting at a newspaper which he held with one hand and a holding piece of toast with the other. A cup of coffee sat on a ceramic coaster on the table.

                He didn’t offer any sort of greeting. “You shouldn’t read in poor light,” Sasha said as Leo looked over to him. “It’s bad for the eyes.”

                Leo looked over. The dark circles under his eyes corroded the halo that the light hanging over him produced. “Don’t you have to work today?”

                “No,” replied Sasha, walking over and taking a sip of Leo’s coffee. “I have other plans.”

                “You know that it’s often considered rude to eat other people’s food without asking permission first?”

                It took a second for him to realize that Leo wasn’t actually being serious. “You know that I work so that you don’t have to pay for your coffee needs?” In fact, Sasha spent so much time here that most of the food in Leo’s kitchen _technically_ belonged to him. Even when he wasn’t here, his aura permeated throughout the small dwelling. His books sat in Leo’s bookshelf, Leo had a drawer full of his clothes, and even some of his tea collection had migrated over here over time. Leo had asked him if he just wanted to move in since he practically lived here anyway several times, but some notion of reticence kept Sasha from accepting the offer. He often spent the night here not because of anything special, but because it took about half as long to reach public transit from here than from where he lived. Right? _Right_.

                Sasha turned on the real kitchen lights and put a pot of water on to boil. “Anything interesting in the news?” he asked. Leo gave Sasha a lengthy summary of the day’s news, adding in bits of context where he found it necessary, and never stuttering or botching a name or location. Even after having spent so much time with him, Sasha never ceased to be impressed by the sheer breadth of Leo’s memory. He could recall the most obscure of names and dates within the blink of an eye. He never allowed himself to skip over a detail, no matter how menial, which was why it was obvious that the man was lying whenever he said that he didn’t remember something. Of course he remembered, but only he could decide whether he wanted it to remain an open part of his recollection. He lied not enough that anyone would acknowledge him as dishonest, but more than anyone gave him credit for.

                He looked over at Sasha, who was eagerly waiting for his water to begin to boil, and smiled slightly. Perhaps it was out of necessity, but recently he had become rather enamored with him. He was a lovely boy- Leo just couldn’t think of him as anything other than a boy, which was the problem. Their age difference was a somewhat significant seven years, but his last partner had been seven years apart from him as well. Perhaps, Leo thought, he was forever bound to command people who were just _less_ than he was. This consideration didn’t undermine the generally friendly and even romantic feelings that he held for Sasha, but instead helped him to rationalize why he had been so hesitant to reciprocate any form of companionship altogether. He felt that Sasha understood this, because he never told Leo, “I love you”, but always, “I’m in love with you.” Sasha never said anything to him that demanded an emotional response. Leo wished, although it would be futile, that Sasha would put in that last bit of emotional attachment. Leo wished that Sasha trusted him to love him back.

\---

                When Sasha left Leo’s apartment ready to face the day, he saw Arthur, who happened to be leaving at the same time. Despite the adversity between Arthur and Leo, Sasha found him to be most reliable _and_ agreeable. They saw each other somewhat often these days, and were as close to being friends as two acquaintances could be without directly expressing a liking for one another.

                “How are you doing, Arthur?” Sasha asked, locking the door behind him with a small silver key. Arthur waited for him to finish his task before continuing to walk. The two climbed down the fire escape together, all the while making light conversation.

                He looked a bit down, but answered, “Well enough.” In reality, he was just tired because he had been kept up by all of the noise that his neighbors had been making late into the night, but hadn’t bothered to go over and tell them to shut up because he supposed that he deserved it. He blinked slowly. “And you?”

                “Just fine. I’ve been thinking of finding a new job,” he confided.

                “Any conclusions?”

                Sasha sighed. “I don’t have any specialization, so my options are open only when it comes to becoming an escort or finding a nearly identical occupation.”

                When the two reached the bottom of the final flight of stairs, Arthur gently patted Sasha’s shoulder and mumbled, “Trust me, the former requires more specialization on your behalf” before hurrying off

                “Wait, what does that even…?” but he was already gone. Sasha thought about it for a few more seconds, but ultimately came to no conclusion.

                Whatever. Arthur may have been a francophone, but it didn’t do much to change the fact that he was British, and thus bound to say weird things sometimes. Sasha had experienced severe culture shock when he first came here, and he supposed that Arthur had never gone through the subsequent phase of assimilation; he continued to use _French_ French words over Quebecois ones. Trying to correct him in this aspect served as nothing but a lost cause. Sasha began to see why Leo criticized him for his lack of self-reflexivity, but thought nothing less of Arthur for it, for he made up for it with his deeply critical outlook towards others. Sasha, too, was critical by nature, but tended to judge people based on his own instincts rather than by drawn out analyses of their words or innate actions.

                As he approached his RTC stop, Sasha’s thoughts became increasingly of Klemens. Whenever he thought of him, it was always passively. Never did he _want_ to think of Klemens, per se, but he always entered his mind at times when he didn’t have anything else to think about. Sasha had seen more of him in the past two weeks than he usually did, but their friendship wasn’t the same as it used to be. A rift had rapidly grown between them, and though it hadn’t grown any wider, its conspicuousness betrayed their relationship. As far as he could tell, Klemens hadn’t changed in his demeanor towards him and he himself hadn’t particularly changed either, so it was unknown as to what drew them apart in the first place. He dearly wanted what Klemens felt for him, and more often than not, he found himself wishing that it was love.

\---

                That evening, Sasha met Klemens and Giuseppina at a local bar. Sasha’s relationship with alcohol could only be described as on-and-off. Whereas Klemens and Giuseppina both enjoyed their drinks in moderation, Sasha was more the sort of person who would engage in intense binge drinking for a night and then lay off for the next month. Even now, he consumed water as he watched his two friends get increasingly drunk. He didn’t really understand the point of going to a crowded, sweaty, overall unpleasant bar to drink when it was easier and safer to just stay home and do the same. Other than for the prospect of potentially getting laid, which he wasn’t particularly concerned about, the appeal was more or less negligible to him. He made a joke: a Russian, an Italian, and an Austrian walk into bar. It would have been funny if there was a punchline.

                As Klemens and Giuseppina loudly discussed everything from politics to arguing about what the seventh largest country was (Giuseppina was right. It was India.), Sasha turned and talked to the woman next to him. She didn’t appear to be with anyone else, but had an air which somehow fascinated Sasha. He tried to think of an interesting conversation starter, but ultimately settled with a “How are you?”

                She turned to Sasha, scrutiny evident in the way that she looked at him. “Are you asking me?” she asked back. She spoke unapologetically and with authority.

                “Yes.”

                “I’m wonderful,” she answered. “How are you?”

                “I’m doing well enough.” Holding out his hand, he continued, “I’m Sasha Pavlovitch Romanov.” He knew that including his middle name was of no use here, but nevertheless, he found it an important part of his identity.

                She shook his hand back with a firm handshake. “Maria Naryshkina.” She paused. “Is Sasha the shortened form of Alexandre?”

                “Indeed it is.” Sasha smiled because it was rare that someone correctly guessed his full name. “Are you Russian?” he asked, recognizing her last name as a Russian one.

                “No,” answered Maria, “but my husband is Russian.”

                “We have so much in common,” he replied sarcastically.

                “If you’re trying to flirt with me…”

                “Nothing of the sort.”

                Maria decided that she could trust Sasha, and warmed up to him considerably. When she finally left before it got too late, Klemens turned to him and asked, “Who was that?”

                “Her name is Maria,” answered Sasha, “and I suppose now that she is my friend.”

                “ _I think she likes you!”_ Giuseppina shouted at him over the din of the bar tactlessly.

                “ _She’s married!”_ Sasha shouted back. Although he didn’t notice, Klemens became visibly tense as he shouted this. He interjected, “ _Just because someone is married doesn’t mean they like their spouse!_ ”

                Giuseppina, who knew the unfortunate truth of Klemens’s unfortunate crush on Sasha, said nothing. Sasha, who still didn’t know that Klemens was married but suspected that he had a crush on him nonetheless, said nothing, either. There was an awkward silence between the three of them before Sasha broke the silence and said, “Klemens, weren’t you supposed to be our designated driver?”

                “Unfortunately, yes.”

                “Do I have to drive both of you home?”

                “Unless you want us all to die, yes.”

                Sasha sighed. “Okay, let’s go.”

                As the trio headed out and Klemens handed Sasha his car keys, Giuseppina commented, “Sasha, I didn’t even know that you had a driver’s license.”

                Sasha didn’t know why he kept on paying the insurance and fees for his license since he was a bad driver and only drove about once every six months, but it came in handy at times like this. When he had first moved here, it wasn’t that difficult to obtain a Canadian license since he could already drive in Russia, so he had decided to just go ahead with it. When it expired after two more years, he decided, he either wouldn’t be living in Canada anymore or wouldn’t get it renewed.

\---

                When he arrived to his _real_ home, he didn’t have any energy to do anything but fall onto his bed and sleep. He didn’t bother to turn the thermostat on, and when he woke up, it was cold enough that all of his extremities felt as if they were ice. Sasha decided in a passionate epiphany that he hated the cold, and had all along. He didn’t _mind_ it, but burned with an intense desire to never soak in it again. He knew that it was utterly futile, however, to avoid the inescapable force that had followed him from birth up until now. Cold was becoming, after all, and he knew nothing but to live with it.

                ‘ _What was I doing last night?’_ he wondered as he gradually woke up more and more. ‘ _Something, I’m sure. I remember driving… Giuseppina and Klemens. That’s right. We went to the bar_.’ Sasha’s short term memory had been short circuiting more and more lately, and he constantly had to ask himself, ‘ _Which book did I finish yesterday? I should remember this.’_ or ‘ _I was talking to someone about something yesterday. I’m certain of that. Who was it?’_ Waves of forgetfulness had always come and gone in his mind, but this was one of the worst ones yet. Sometimes Leo filled him in on details when he absolutely couldn’t remember, but usually he kept his bouts to himself because Leo’s near-perfect memory annoyed and embittered him more than it ever helped.

                Sasha blamed the problem on the increasing level of routine in his life; he had obtained everything he wanted, and now had nothing to strive after anymore. His life consisted of going to work, seeing Leo, occasionally going out with a friend (usually Klemens), and nothing else. This routine lifestyle had been nice for the last couple of months, but now he was growing restless from the useless anticipation. Nothing he could find, however, needed changing. He had made friends, was in an ambiguous relationship with a man who had seemed impossible, and was probably due for a promotion soon. He had told Arthur that he was looking for a new job, but it was a lie. He just didn’t have anything new to tell him.

\---

                Leo still thought about Josephine somewhat often, but he thought about her less often than he had in months. He thought of her passively, as he recalled any detail of the past seven years. In several most important aspects, he even preferred Sasha to Josephine; for one, despite his utter lack of commitment to life, he lived intelligently and thoughtfully; Leo never quite understood how Josephine had managed to function so well with neither intelligence nor thought. Sasha was an almost grotesquely beautiful man, but he could hardly compare to the beauty of a beautiful woman. He was oblivious (or so Leo thought) to the fact that anyone else was attracted to him. He was good with his body and with his hands, but his innate sense of reticence kept him from being anything but awkward at sex. Leo found it a sharp contrast to his previous partners, who had all been artful sluts.

                Was that sexist? In any case, Leo didn’t care; whether it was or not, it was just _true_.

\---

                Sasha invited Klemens over for dinner that Saturday, hoping to do something to lessen the rift between them. Klemens had decidedly been acting weird while they were at the bar a few days ago, between essentially ignoring Sasha and his seemingly arbitrary comment about people not liking their spouses.

                After finishing dinner in a bout of familiar, meaningless conversation, Sasha gazed over his balcony with Klemens and finally asked, “Klemens, are we okay?”

                Klemens monotonously replied, “What do you mean?”

                “I mean, I haven’t known you for that long, and I thought we were close, but I don’t know how you’ve been feeling recently.” He paused, and then continued, “And you were acting strange at the bar the other day, and I’m not sure whether it was because you were drunk, but you’re not really the _sad and angry_ drunk type. Is there anything that you want to tell me? If you don’t want to be around me, you can just tell me.” Sasha went on for a bit, and didn’t think anything of it when Klemens slowly drew closer and closer to him. He finally understood Klemens’s intentions when he wrapped his arms around his neck and shoulders, but he couldn’t tell whether he was leaning down or whether Klemens was leaning up.

                Sasha didn’t think of Leo the first time that he kissed Klemens, and tried to block out any inferior, subpar sensations. It lasted for about five seconds until Klemens realized the impulsiveness of what he was doing and pushed Sasha off of him somewhat forcefully.

                The words “I love you” slid passively out of Sasha’s mouth, too subtly and too naturally for him to notice them. Klemens was about to reciprocate, but instead blended his words to say, “I… don’t think that we should see each other anymore. I’m sorry, Sasha.”

                Sasha, now standing two feet away from Klemens, couldn’t imagine that they had been so close mere seconds ago. “I’m sorry too, Klemens,” he apologized. His mind reverted until he couldn’t think in French, and he couldn’t think in Russian, and he found it difficult to speak properly. He felt differently for Klemens than he did for Leo, but he couldn’t decide what exactly made his feelings different. They just _were_. Instead of feeling completely  hollow like the time that he had confessed love to Leo, he felt an almost pleasant awakening of long suppressed emotions within him. “It was… just… it was just a kiss,” he said. Two months ago, he wouldn’t have considered a kiss to be something so insignificant. “I don’t want to end our friendship over something this.” He still found difficulty in finding the words to describe what he wanted to say, but they came to him slowly and surely. “It was the heat of the moment. It doesn’t mean anything.”

                “You told me _I love you_ without even having to think about it first,” Klemens snapped back scornfully. “Does that not mean anything to you?”

                While Sasha searched for the right words to defend himself, Klemens continued. The cold wind blew his hair onto his face, but he didn’t care. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It was just a kiss, sure, but when does one kiss become two? Or three? Neither one of us will be able to ignore it, or act like it never happened.

                “And you’re in a relationship with a man who will never love you back, and you just accept it. And I’m… Sasha, I’m married. I have a wife in Austria. I don’t love her, but I respect her, and I owe her my fidelity. I gave up my vows the moment I met you.”

                Sasha had never realized that Klemens, in his months of aloofness and distancing himself, had been bearing such a curse of rage and passion. In the space of five minutes, he had seen Metternich unfulfilled, fulfilled, and defeated.

                “Maybe in another life where we weren’t held apart by preexisting conditions we would fall in love, and be together, and be _happy_ together, but…” He moved to kiss Sasha again, because his words weren’t precise enough to deliver a position on his frustration. Sasha kind of began to understand why Josephine had cheated on Leo.

                He paused and looked at the ground before he looked back at Sasha. “What do you want, Sasha?” he asked.

                Sasha sighed. It was the second time he had been asked this question, but this time, he knew exactly how to answer. After taking a deep breath, he said, “I don’t want anything from you.” It was the truth.

\---

                In the following weeks, Klemens denied that anything had ever happened between him and Sasha to suggest anything but friendship, or at least he avoided mentioning or alluding to it. Although he would never admit it, however, he savored those memories and thought of them constantly. Neither of them went on to acknowledge that they felt _anything_ for each other besides friendship, but the events themselves had helped to foster a deeper sense of intimacy between them. Among the changes that had taken place was that they began to touch each other far more often in the most innocent ways- a small brush of their hands as they walked along or an occasional hand on the other’s shoulder.

                Sasha wanted to ask Klemens more bout his wife, but Klemens continued to pretend that he wasn’t married and that Sasha knew absolutely nothing about the matter. Sasha wanted to know her name, what she looked like, and most importantly, who she was and why Klemens had married her. Had he just started to wear his wedding band or had he been wearing it all along without his notice? There were so many questions, and most of them began with “why”. He never brought himself to ask any of them, however, and let the mysteries and the questions drift through his mind.

                One day at the end of April, he decided to ask Leo if he knew anything.

                “Did you know that Klemens is married?” he asked. The two were passing a lazy Saturday evening at Sasha’s apartment, and the question seemed to some out of nowhere.

                Leo had been teasing for a while the idea that Sasha harbored deep and unspoken feelings for Klemens, but found it so ridiculous that he dismissed the notion altogether. “I did,” he said. “You sound distressed.” He didn’t look up from the book that he was reading, Sasha’s old volume of Pushkin.

                “Why didn’t you tell me?” Sasha demanded, breaking the leisurely mood.

                He couldn’t use the excuse that he thought that Sasha already knew, because he knew that Sasha was aware of the fact that he had known all along and just hadn’t ever bothered to inform him. “I didn’t think that it was my right to tell you if it was something that he didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t as if he ever told me outright, either… I just happened to notice his wedding band the first time I met him. He doesn’t wear it very often, does he?”

                Sasha broke another question out of the blue. “Do you still have your engagement ring?” Leo finally looked up and saw his partner with a considerable amount of tears in his eyes. Wiping away some of Sasha’s tears with his thumb, Leo replied, “My engagement ring? From…?”

                “The only point in time when you were engaged.”

                “Are you…?”

                “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

                “Well, it’s a funny story, actually…”

                “And you’re going to tell it.” This was another demand.

                Leo sighed. “I wasn’t ever engaged. I was only betrothed.”

                “Engaged, betrothed, same thing…”

                “Desirée and I, we were going to get married, but there was no formal engagement.” _And then some family affairs came up and I started seeing Josephine and now I’m here. So much for Clisson and Eugénie._

                “Were you ever planning on proposing to Josephine?”

                He had learned in the past months how to stay calm and not tense up whenever her name slipped from anyone’s mouth. “Of course not,” he lied. “Where did this marriage conversation come from?”

                “It’s not really important…”

                “If you insist, I won’t press you about it.”

                Sasha didn’t know how to respond. The logical next move would be to divulge that he had kissed Klemens, but it wasn’t as if he could or ever would disclose this information to Leo. Giving up the conversation altogether, he tried to convince himself that this entire ordeal was stupid and meaningless. But, regardless of whether or not it was stupid, it wasn’t all meaningless to _him_ , and that made all the difference.

                When they had kissed, however, no matter how badly Sasha wanted to deny it, Klemens had had a point: the words _I love you_ fell from Sasha’s mouth without his even thinking about it, and the more Sasha actually thought about it after the fact, he more he realized that it was _true_. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that he had, after all, fallen in love with Klemens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a sincere apology to anyone who thought that Leo and Sasha were going to be nothing but happy for the rest of time :)


	9. Chapter 8

                On Saturday evening, as usual, Leo and Sasha passed their time reading in Leo’s relatively unfurnished living room. The two had recently returned from a screening of a film that Sasha claimed was his favorite, and as he had done every night for the past two weeks, he was just planning on spending the night at Leo’s apartment. Instead of reading their individual volumes, however, they were in such a position that Leo leaned with his back on Sasha’s chest, and Sasha held the book so that they could read _together_. Although it worked because of Leo’s tininess compared to Sasha, the entire scene was so domestic and sweet that it gave him cavities.

Sasha had been flipping pages in silence for some time when he asked, “Would you ever consider going by Napoleon?” He found it kind of difficult to speak with all of Leo’s weight on him, but enjoyed the contact enough that he wouldn’t have told him to move.

                Leo, unfazed in the least by the new noise, answered, “I went by _Napoleone_ when I was younger, and then in my early twenties I changed it to _Napoleon_ , and then when I moved here I started going by to Leo because people with shorter names usually find better jobs.” Despite the fact that he had gone by Leo for years now, it still wasn’t the name that he called himself; he signed all of his informal, mostly illegible notes with just _Nap._ “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who misspelled it as _Naopleon._ ” He paused, thinking about _Naopleon_ for a moment _._ “Naopleon doesn’t even… it doesn’t even sound like a word!”

“Why?” he continued. “Do you prefer it to Leo?”

                “You’re right that it’s a mouthful, but it’s certainly sexier than Leo.”

                Leo laughed. “Sexier? Then, it’s a definite maybe.”

                “Would you consider going by Alexandre?” he then asked. “ _Have_ you ever gone by Alexandre?”

                Sasha almost winced at the sound of his full name. “Sure, to my teachers at school and to the Canadian embassy. My friends and family have always just called me Sasha. It’s a friendly nickname.” He had never really thought about what it would be like to go by Alexandre before. “Alexandre is just too formal. Imagine _President Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov._ Or better, _Tsar Alexandre I of Russia_.” By now, whatever they had been reading before was completely forgotten.

                “If I hadn’t fallen in love with calculus and become a physicist,” said Leo, “I would have been the President of France. And then, perhaps, of the European Council.” He said this with such conviction that he couldn’t possibly have been joking. He genuinely thought that he would have been the President of France and the European Council. Sasha briefly wondered if he was dating a narcissist, and then realized that this wasn’t the first time that he had wondered this. He stored the question away and changed the subject.

                “Again, when is your sister coming to live with us for a year?” he asked.

                “Us?”

                Sasha shook his head, a bit embarrassed even though they essentially lived together at this point. The only things that he missed about spending the bulk of his time at his actual apartment for which he still paid an irrational sum were surprise visits from Klemens, which mostly happened because Sasha was almost completely negligent of their friendship and were usually angry visits, but were nice nonetheless. The two had a Thing for each other which Sasha preferred not to think about when he was around his actual partner, so he pushed that thought out of his mind as well. “With _you_ ,” he corrected himself.

                “You know that you have my permission to live here, right?” Sasha didn’t answer. “I don’t know the date of her flight, but at the end of June.”

                “I would love to meet your sister. My own brother…s… are…” he struggled to find the right word. “ _Interesting_.”

                “I would love to meet her too.” Leo’s voice was, for once, tinged with sadness. Sasha noted that while he didn’t care that much about his family, Leo certainly cared about his.

\---

                The next day, when Sasha didn’t have work, he decided to call his brother Kostya again. It had been a while, about four months, since the two had spoken last, and even then they had merely exchanged holiday greetings and moved on. There was no emotion in that short exchange. It was, as Kostya might put it, insincere. Despite everything, the two had a sort of symbiotic relationship; Kostya could expel all of his bitter hatred on Sasha, and in return, Sasha could divulge things to Kostya that he didn’t feel that he could tell anyone else about. His brother was many things, many of them relating to his intrinsic bitterness, but he _was_ trustworthy.

                ‘ _Insincere!’_ thought Sasha. He had never quite recovered from his brother’s criticism of him, and likely never would. He had been insulted before and would be again, but this one bit deep into his flesh because some part of him knew that Kostya had been absolutely correct. ‘ _Me, insincere! Ridiculous.’_

                The phone rang, and a couple of minutes after he typed in the international dialing codes, Kostya finally picked up the phone.

                “ _Sasha?”_ he asked. “ _It has been a long time. Why are you calling me?”_

                Sasha wished that he had a telephone cord to twist around his finger as he spoke. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

                “ _What do you want?”_

                “I don’t want anything. I want to know how you’re doing.”

                “ _Fine_.”

                “How are your studies?”

                “ _They’re going relatively well.”_ Kostya was studying politics or something at university, but Sasha couldn’t for the life of him remember what exactly it was. “ _I know why you called. Just tell me about your love life already.”_

                “That’s sort of sweet. Kostya cares about his older brother, after all…”

                “ _Just get it over with.”_

                Sasha held his breath for a moment before exhaling slowly and letting a string of disconnected words fall from his mouth. “I may have committed some mild… light… infidelity.”

                All the way across the globe in St. Petersburg, Kostya squinted as he simultaneously took in the information that not only had his stupid gay brother started dating the man over whom he had swooned for a year, but that he had already cheated on him as well. If Sasha’s perennial state of loneliness gave him an inch, he went ahead and took a mile.

                “ _With whom?_ ”

                “The Austrian guy. Tell me you’re disappointed in me.”

                “ _To be quite frank, Sasha, I just expected this from you. Are you going to start seeing_ him _, now?”_

                “I don’t know.”

                “ _I’m sorry. I can’t deal with all of your shit, Sasha. I’m hanging up.”_ A second later, Sasha heard a dial tone again, and felt more alone in his guilt than ever.

                ‘ _Why doesn’t Klemens have to share any of the blame for this?’_ he wondered. ‘ _It’s not my fault that he fell in love with me at the wrong time. Why didn’t anyone warn me that I’m not the only one who feels this way?’_ He remembered that when he had first met Klemens, he had told him that he reminded him of Leo. He wasn’t sure if Klemens remembered this, but just thinking about it now brought him a stab of pain. They weren’t the same, he realized. He loved Leo, but he didn’t know or understand him or what it was that held them together. He adored Leo, but had purposely stayed away from him just enough to start loving someone else. And yet, despite his understanding of his wrongdoings, he couldn’t bring himself to feel an ounce of regret for what he had done. It was just too hard to feel guilty on the behalf of someone who never seemed to feel anything beyond the initial tingle.

\---

                Arthur knew that it was going to happen eventually, so he didn’t feel too dejected when it actually happened. Every relationship, after all, had its expiration date, whether it was a disagreement or death. Still, he moped for the rest of the night and the rest of the next day before he finally decided to be productive in his time of misery.

                What news! Giuseppina had decided to move to Montreal to further pursue her career, and her first order of business had been to tell him that it wasn’t going to last much longer. The whole thing had been both expected and amicable, but still Arthur was hurt by the eventual ending of their relationship. In any case, he _was_ expecting to be accepted to a PhD program which would have ended their relationship too, but he was selfish in that he would rather have been the bearer of bad news than the receiver.

                He headed over to Leo’s apartment, hoping to ask an important favor despite their mutual animosity. He knocked three times loudly, the force of his fist almost echoing through the cheap wood of the door. It took about a minute before Leo opened the door.

                “Arthur.” he said, not really offering a greeting.

                Arthur didn’t offer a greeting either. He was a bit shocked, actually, because Leo almost always forced Sasha to talk to him when he didn’t want to. “Leo,” he said, trying to be cordial. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”

                “If you’re here to proposition me, I politely decline.” Leo had a perverse sense of humor that others didn’t understand sometimes, and this was one of them. Arthur frowned, staring at Leo confusedly.

                “No… I’m not… I don’t even… _whatever_.” He recollected his thoughts. “You know the conference in Montréal at the beginning of next month?”

                It was the conference that Leo hadn’t been invited to because he hadn’t been at the lab for enough time to find any particularly meaningful data. “What about it?”

                “It’s at the same time that Giuseppina is moving there. I’d like you to fill in for me. I’ll…”

                Leo didn’t let Arthur finish his sentence. “I’ll do it.”

\---

                When Sasha went back to his actual apartment that he paid for, he almost wished that he spent more time here due to the utter lack of any groceries in his kitchen. He decided that perhaps it would  just be better to move in with Leo because, as Leo constantly reminded him, he practically lived there anyway. When it came to it, there wasn’t much anymore to take. Most of his tea drawer was already empty and most of the books remaining in his bookshelf were the ones that he had read once and then never again. It just wasn’t worth it to keep on living in this place which had become a former shell of itself, took up a considerable portion of his paycheck, and which he didn’t identify with anymore in the slightest.

                ‘ _I can’t believe,’_ he thought, _‘that this is the place that I seldom used to leave.’_

                After looking around the dust-covered place once again, he seriously considered picking up his cell phone and calling Leo to ask if he could just officially move in tomorrow. However, when he caught sight of his balcony, he ultimately decided against it. This place had lost almost all of its previous sacredness as a home, but the balcony would never lose what it meant to him. It was, after all, the place where he had first kissed Leo, and the place where he had made banter with Klemens countless times and eventually kissed him, too.

                Instead, he dug through a closet until he found his feather duster, and began dusting everything off that he decided he would begin to use again- his tabletops, bookshelves, counters, and furniture. He picked up the copy of _Werther_ that had been on his table for weeks. He went to set it on the bookshelf where it belonged, before he noticed something strange. It didn’t _have_ any special place in his bookshelf; it was Leo’s book that had been lent to him months ago, that he had never bothered to give back. Whatever. He could give it back another day, he decided, and set it back down.

                After he was finished with dusting every surface he could find, he decided that there was nothing more that he could do to make this _his_ apartment again, for now, and decided to celebrate by having a drink. When Sasha rummaged through his cabinets for something, however, he found nothing but a few bottles of terrible dessert wine which he was saving for the eventual day when he would be tasked with bringing liquor somewhere. Unfortunately, that day had not yet come. Deciding that it was better than nothing, however, he twisted open the bottle and mentally toasted himself before taking a long drink of the all-too-cloying beverage.

                He fell asleep after a few hours, not having been this disgustingly drunk in months. Getting drunk didn’t make him feel the intoxicated catharsis that he was expecting, but instead a paranoid self-pity. He had gotten the wish that he had made all the way in September to find more friends, but all of the bitterness in his relationships now hit him back with an equal, opposite reaction. He thought that he had changed within the past few months, but he hadn’t thought about the fact that his rate of change didn’t affect anyone but himself. He hated the fact that he had an intrinsic aura of gentleness. He envied the way that Klemens could handle everything with a cold air of diplomacy. Whether they were right or wrong, everyone thought that he was so easy to read that he had no choice but to bend to a general will. He produced a shallow image of a gentle gay intellectual-type and nothing else.

                And with this unprecedented level of self-judgment, he fell asleep on his cold bed.

                And when he woke up again, he decided that last night’s philosophical inquiries and mentalities were nothing but a product of sickly drunkenness. Subsequently, he decided to just move his remaining few objects into Leo’s apartment and be done with it. He no longer associated this place with comfort and belonging, but only with self-pity. There was absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain in letting go of it.

\---

                A few days later, the entire gang (Sasha, Klemens, Leo, Giuseppina, Arthur, and vaguely Antoine) gathered again at a local garden in order to celebrate Giuseppina’s birthday. Because she was moving out of town soon, she had decided to cut expenses on her birthday celebration by hosting a small picnic outdoors instead of a formal dinner. And, although the affair was completely informal, it had an air of frivolous charm nonetheless.

                But, most importantly, the affair was awkward for every reason that it could possibly have been awkward. Only Giuseppina and Arthur had really spent time with Antoine recently, so it took everyone else some time to get caught up with whatever he was doing. Sasha and Klemens hadn’t seen each other ever since they had mutually committed some _light_ , _mild_ infidelity, and they could barely make eye contact with each other. Leo, who noticed that Sasha wasn’t speaking to Klemens at all, tried to make up for this gap in their communication by making unpleasant small talk with Klemens. Although Arthur and Leo hated each other, their relationship was one built purely on politeness, and all of their interactions came out as nothing but affected and insolent. Arthur hadn’t yet fully registered the fact that Giuseppina was moving away in  few short weeks, and even their conversation was too dry to be remotely genuine. Someone forgot to bring the wine, and in occasions such as these, wine was nothing but cheap glue to hold a party together.

                The gathering lasted for about two hours, and strangely enough, Antoine ended up being the social champion. When it ended, Giuseppina had no comments but, “This has been fun, but let’s never do it again.”

\---

                Strangely enough, Leo had the good fortune to pass another birthday with Arthur, Giuseppina, and Antoine just two weeks later; Arthur’s birthday was on the first of May, which happened to be the same day that they all drove down to Montreal in an ensemble for various reasons. Leo was to attend the conference that Arthur had to miss, Arthur and Giuseppina were there to help Giuseppina move in to her new home, and Antoine had come along solely to check out Montreal’s arts culture. The entire excursion was to last a week

                Giuseppina had found lodging with a Québecoise actress whom she knew, a Mademoiselle George. Mademoiselle George, she said, went by Josephine-Marguerite. Leo didn’t think that Josephine was a common name at all, and yet here came a third into his life. For the entirety of the three-hour drive to Montreal, Leo didn’t think about physics or about any of the people whom he was with or what they were saying. In the absence of Sasha, his mind was unapologetically fixed on Josephine again. Despite all of the times that he had tried to compartmentalize his thoughts, he could never quite rid himself of her. Whenever his mind had time to wander, it wandered in the same direction, one of which it never seemed to tire. He certainly _liked_ Sasha and even loved him in one way or another, but nothing seemed to compare to that which had been lost on him.

                It was only when Antoine struck up a conversation with him that he entered the mundane reality of the long drive again. He gently nudged Leo’s shoulder, and Leo looked up at him without the slightest trace of emotion or nostalgia on his face.

                “What are you reading?” asked Antoine, gesturing to the book that he was reading. It was a slim volume that he had brought along solely for pleasure. Leo realized that he had been staring at the same page for half of an hour without having read a single word.

                “It’s…” Leo closed the book and gestured to the cover. It was _Dead Souls_ by Nikolai Gogol. “ _Dead Souls_ by Nikolai Gogol.”

                “Do you ever read anything from after the nineteenth century?”

                Flipping briefly to the copyright page, Leo answered, “Of course. This edition is from 1996.” The friendship of Leo and Antoine was one almost entirely founded on sarcasm.

                Antoine sighed. By now, he was well used to Leo’s terrible sense of humor. “Do you have anything that I can read?” he asked.

                In response, Leo handed him the book, because it wasn’t as if he was going to make any progress in it. When Antoine opened the well-loved book, he flipped through the first few pages. Given the frequency at which Leo claimed that fiction was unmasculine, he was somewhat surprised that he would even own a book like this. On the top left corner of the title page, however, he discovered a name elegantly signed in a language that he couldn’t identify for the life of him. After realizing that this was Sasha’s signature, he glanced briefly at Leo and then back at the ink on the paper. He hoped that one day he could find a wife who was as discreetly romantic as Leo was.

\---

                In the week-long absence of Leo, Sasha decided that he had to see Klemens again. After that night when they had kissed, nothing had ameliorated. They had been actively avoiding each other for days, and Sasha decided that if he was going to end up doing any more cheating, then now was a better time than ever. In accordance with this sentiment, he nervously texted Klemens about his situation, and the two decided to meet covertly at a spot near the Saint Lawrence River.

                Two hours later, they met at an area overlooking the water. Because of the cold and the imminent dusk, there was nobody around but the two of them. It was, Sasha thought, a perfect time and place to get either stabbed or mugged.

                Instead of speaking, the two of them sat in silence for a while and just watched and heard the water move past them. Neither of them knew what to say or how to say it. Everything would just sound embarrassing or awkward.

                Sasha gently entangled his fingers with Klemens’s, pretending to be unaware of what he was doing despite the fact that his actions were well calculated. He expected a passive compliance from Klemens, but instead, Klemens withdrew his hand and said, “Sasha, I can’t take this anymore.”

                “What are you…?”

                “All of this… being around you and sleeping in the same bed as you and pretending that nothing ever happened. I can’t do it anymore.” He still didn’t say that he was in love with Sasha, but Sasha was well aware that he was.

                “I don’t think that we should see each other anymore,” he continued. “All you bring me is futile longing.

                “But,” he continued, “I couldn’t bear never seeing you again. It’s a catch-22. It’s egregious, really.”

                Sasha didn’t think that Klemens was using the term _catch-22_ correctly, but he didn’t bother to correct him. In terms of literature, he thought their situation more comparable to that of young Werther. He felt a drop of rain hit his face, and winced. Seemingly suddenly, tiny of droplets of rain began to fall at a rapid rate, but neither Sasha nor Klemens acknowledged them.

                Despite himself, he smiled. “The sufferings of young Klemens…” he said, “and the sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch.” And despite himself, Klemens smiled too at the reference.

Sasha continued, “We should be open with each other.”

Klemens couldn’t agree more, but there was so much for them to discuss. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“I enjoyed kissing you, Klemens,” admitted Sasha, “but I want to know what your entire issue is.”

“Is this about the marriage thing?” He was less than enthusiastic about discussing the entire marriage thing and began to wring his hands.

“Of _course_ it’s about the marriage thing.”

Sighing, he explained, “It’s not so complicated. I have a wife who lives in Austria.”

“Why did you marry her?”

“I was in love.”

“What is her name?”

“Maria Eleonore… Maria Eleonore _Metternich_.”

“Don’t tell me you have any children with her.”

“It’s completely out of the question.”

Sasha breathed an audible sigh of relief, but he didn’t realize that this was Klemens’s way of dodging the subject matter altogether. He briefly imagined himself as Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov-Metternich before dismissing the hypothetical altogether. The sky was completely dark at this point, and his hair and jacket were completely drenched by the onslaught of tiny drops.

“Why don’t you live together?” he asked.

Klemens asked a question of his own. “Would _you_ want to move from Austria to Quebec?”

“No,” admitted Sasha. _Certainly_ not if he had had the good fortune of being born an Austrian. Finally, he asked the difficult question of Klemens. “Were you…” he began, “always faithful to her before we…?”

“It depends on what the word ‘ _faithful’_ means. Emotionally, yes, but physically, no. Before I met you, I had been taking various men and women for months. My attraction never translated into attachment before I met you.”

                While he was kind of offended by the fact that cheating was a regular thing for Klemens, at the same time, Sasha was kind of flattered. He kissed Klemens’s cold hand, his rain-covered jaw, and finally, the corner of his mouth. Even this marginal contact was almost too much for Klemens to bear.

                “I won’t kiss you on the mouth,” said Sasha, “if you don’t want me to.” His words hung still in the emptiness. He shivered.

                “It would please me if you did.” For once, Klemens dissipated his air of cold diplomacy and kissed Sasha. When Sasha eventually began to pull away, Klemens kissed him harder, and he relented.

                When it was over, Sasha, now breathless, asked Klemens in between pants for air, “Do you… do you love me?”

                He paused for a moment before answering the question. He had never directly told Sasha that he loved him, and although he knew that it would come up eventually, it was a subject that he hoped to avoid for as long as possible.

                “…Yes,” he answered. In the cloudy darkness, only a silhouette of his face could be clearly seen. Behind this cover of darkness and white noise from the river, it was somehow easier to disclose what he actually felt. If it had been bright outside, he would have answered with an unequivocal “no”.

                “I love you,” said Sasha in return. Through both Klemens’s confession and his own, he felt a significant weight slide off of his shoulders, but he almost immediately felt another one take its place.

                Klemens began to say, “What about…” before Sasha cut him off. He didn’t want to hear Leo’s name. He didn’t want to be reminded of his awkward position of mutual infidelity with Klemens.

                “I love Leo too,” he confessed, “but in a different way. I feel love for him, but I’m in love with you.”

                “I don’t see the difference.” _Egregious_.

                “Loving someone is a consistent action but I think that being in love is more spontaneous.” He had thought through the issue for hours on end.

This didn’t help at all. “What do you want, Sasha?”

Sasha stared at Klemens, unsure whether this was a test or a legitimate question without any simple answer. Finally, he answered in the only way he could think of. “I don’t want anything from you,” he said. “I just want you to let me love you.” This expression contained the same sentiments that he had expressed to Leo months ago; however, for better or for worse, Klemens was _not_ Leo.

                “That’s sweet,” he replied, “but it means absolutely nothing to me. What do you really want?” Perhaps, he thought, he was being harsh, but his law practice had made him intolerant of ambiguity. His clothes were now completely drenched, and he began to lose feeling in his extremities.

                Finally, Sasha once again kissed the corner of Klemens’s mouth and answered, “I want you to love me.” It was all that he could say that he wanted without promising anything from himself or asking for more than he already had.


	10. Fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha texted Klemens that he had fallen ill with a fever and that he was probably going to die soon. Klemens texted back almost immediately that he was working, but would try to find the time to come see him in the evening. Klemens was useless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how long this will be but my estimate is about twenty chapters and I'm currently working on chapter fifteen :0

 

                By virtue of the fact that he had grown up surrounded by the cold, Sasha was ashamed of the fact that he had fallen so ill after being caught in the rain. He hadn’t had so much as a cold for two years, but the next day he woke up with a fever. What was worse was that two days ago, he had moved the remainder of his things to the apartment which he and Leo now shared, and in the process, he had thrown out all of his medicine. And Leo, as obstinate as he was, adamantly refused to carry any.

                He reached out from the comfort of the bed, blindly reached around until he grabbed his cell phone, and texted Leo, ‘ _Leo why don’t you have any fucking cold medicine.’_ He then texted Klemens that he had fallen ill with a fever and that he was probably going to die soon. Klemens texted back almost immediately that he was working, but would try to find the time to come see him in the evening. Klemens was useless.

                The one time that Sasha allowed himself to act needy and pathetic was when he was struggling with illness, whether it was a persisting malady or an insignificant cold. While he absolutely _hated_ being sick, he also kind of enjoyed having an excuse to be idle for a few days, even if he was in severe discomfort. If Leo, Klemens, Giuseppina, Arthur, or Antoine couldn’t help him out now, he decided to ask Maria Naryshkina if she would come help him out.

\---

                Forty-five minutes later, Maria knocked on the front door, and Sasha dragged his feet on his way to answer it.

                “Hey, Maria…” he said, limply opening the door. Maria stared at him with such scrutiny that Sasha thought that he should have just dealt with the fever on his own. He briefly wondered if it was sexist to ask one of his token female friends to help him in his time of need.

                Maria stepped inside and took her shoes off at the door. “You need to sit down,” she said in Russian. “It’s _hot_.” Although the temperature outside was fairly cool and breezy, the interior of this place resembled a sauna more than anything. Sasha had turned the heating up all the way.

                “I know. It’s not hot enough.”

                “I brought cold medicine and herbal tea.”

                “Thank you.”

                Although Maria and Sasha had only met a month ago, they quickly grew close, mainly over the fact that they could speak in Russian to each other. She was only here for another four months in order to fulfill some legal task, but their friendship took a solid form in the fact that she lived in St. Petersburg, where Sasha planned to return someday. They had also grown close because she was only twenty and he was only twenty-three, so they shared a mutual inexperience in the world that surrounded them. Because Sasha was constantly surrounded by people who were considerable older than he was, however, he had grown accustomed to treating the people around him as wiser than he was. In this, even though Maria was only twenty, Sasha tended to treat her as if she was his elder.

                Maria forced Sasha to down the herbal tea before he could take the medicine, and while they were both at Sasha’s kitchen table, she asked him how he had managed to fall so ill so quickly.

                Sasha, who didn’t want to explain the full story, merely answered by saying that he had been out in the rain yesterday.

                “Being in the rain did this to you?” she asked.

                In response, Sasha smiled weakly. “I should have chosen yesterday to get horribly drunk so that the heat and the coldness would cancel out.” Along with his strength, his wit had really taken a hit today.

                “Alcohol’s a stimulant,” Maria replied. “It would do the opposite thing. For the best result, you should have taken cocaine.”

                Taking another sip of his tea, he replied, “Who would sell hard drugs to someone like me?”

                Maria didn’t answer this, but she generally agreed that Sasha was too soft for hard drugs. She changed the subject. “How long do you want me to be here?”

                “How long are you willing to be here for?”

                She grimaced. “I have to go home by five and work on my studies.” Maria was in her third year of university, and while she was here, she was self-studying for the exams which determined one hundred percent of her grades. She planned to fly back to pass her upcoming exams, and then return and finish all of her work here. She studied theoretical linguistics and fluently spoke about six languages compared to Sasha’s measly two and a half.

                Sasha coughed, not wanting to hold Maria back from passing her exams. “Klemens said that he would come nurse me back to health once he’s done working for today, and that’s probably at seven, but I can handle being on my own for a couple of hours. I’m an adult.”

                “Is Klemens the German guy?”

                “Well, technically he’s Austrian, but yes.”

                “What does he do?”

                “Law.” Sasha didn’t really want to talk about Klemens after the emotional debacle the day before, so he changed the subject. “So what exactly do theoretical linguists do, again?” he asked. He finished the last of his tea and took two pills of cold medicine. He still felt absolutely terrible, but Maria’s presence helped considerably.

                Maria wasn’t really sure what she wanted to do with her degree in linguistics other than eventually get a doctorate and maybe go into academia. “You can go into academia,” she answered.

                “Is that it?”

                “Do you think that anyone in the world has any practical need for a theoretical philologist?” Sasha said nothing, but he supposed that he couldn’t really judge her lack of direction when he was a barista whose sole area of expertise was nineteenth century Russian literature. Maria continued. “It’s the beauty of creating new information for the sake of creating new information.”

                “I suppose that as long as you get paid, it doesn’t really matter what you do.”

                “You mean that if you were paid one million dollars to sit in an empty room for eight hours every day, you would do it?” The lack of specificity in Maria’s question gave Sasha an outlet to express his inner corruption.

                He appeared to think about it for a second, now having completely forgotten about the prospect of death hanging before him. “If I was to be paid a million dollars every _day_ , sitting alone in a room for eight hours per day for five days every week, then I would definitely do it. Eventually, I would have enough money to buy elections in my favor and make more of an impact that I would ever have been able to by having a real job. If this was per _week_ then I might consider it, but certainly not if I was only making one million per year.”

                Maria thought that Sasha’s “ _only one million per year”_ was particularly cocky for someone who hadn’t gone to college and could essentially do whatever he wanted because his family had money. Although she felt a deep affection for Sasha, she very much hoped that he would one day have to meet reality on even footing.

\---

                Klemens looked around the apartment. He had never been here before, but couldn’t believe the contrast from the place where Sasha used to live. If he hadn’t already known that two people lived here, he wouldn’t have thought that anyone lived here at all. The place was under-furnished but immaculate, although someone had tried to fill up the empty walls by hanging some framed maps and paintings. Klemens recognized “By the Seashore” and “Children on the Seashore” by Auguste Renoir, as well as a hew others that he could not name. These had to have been Sasha’s selection; he couldn’t imagine Leo picking out such frivolous, charming artwork. The place carried the intrinsic and welcoming smell of tea, which Sasha had ceased to notice. No pen, coffee mug, or article of clothing sat out of place anywhere. No dust was to be seen. While some walls were decorated, others were completely cold and barren. The clash of warmth and frigidity pervaded every aspect of the household so deeply that it made Klemens somewhat uncomfortable.

                Sasha stared at him as he took his shoes off at the door and took a moment to look around the place. “So this is where you live now?” he asked. He had been to Arthur’s flat a few times in the past, and because the layouts were identical, he already knew where everything was.

                By now, Sasha’s fever had left him, and instead of _feverish_ and bad he just felt bad. He smiled weakly. “This place belongs to me more than it belongs to Leo,” he answered.

                “Would he be okay with my being here?” Klemens felt deeply conflicted about being in this apartment itself; on one hand, he was intruding upon the private and intimate threshold of Sasha’s and Leo’s relationship, but on the other hand, he wasn’t intruding upon anything that he hadn’t already destroyed. This apartment was the physical manifestation of everything that he wanted to avoid.

                “As long as you’re only here to nurse me back to health.”

                “It’s my fault that you’re like this. It’s the least I could do.”

                “Maria was here earlier today. I told her about you.”

                Klemens was still awkwardly standing in front of the closed door. “The fellow Russian?”

                Amused by the parallels between this interaction and the one that he had had earlier today, Sasha laughed and then coughed. “Well, technically, she’s Polish, but yes.”

                “What does she do?”

                “Theoretical linguistics.” Sasha paused, and then gestured behind him. “Do you want to come inside?” he asked.

                “I’d love to.” He would _not_ love to, but did anyway.

\---

                Under Sasha’s instruction, Klemens was making tea for both of them. He was normally a ‘coffee’ sort of guy, but tea would suffice here and there.

                “So what did you tell Maria?” he asked, holding his hand over the pot closely enough that he could feel the steam rise on it. Although he attempted to sound as casual as possible, it was one of paranoia. Because of both the publicity of his career and because of whom he was as a person, he was more deeply concerned with others’ opinions of him than anyone he knew. This concern affected him almost to a fault, and had persisted throughout his entire life. Although he wasn’t aware of it, it caused him to act coldly diplomatic in his overall demeanor, which, ironically, was what other people didn’t like about him.

                “I told her that you _are_ ‘that German guy’ and that you practice law. That’s it.”

                Despite himself, Klemens laughed. “I’m not even _German_ ,” he groaned. “I’m _Austrian_. And I spent years in Strasbourg, so if I’m German, then I’m French, too.”

                Sasha coughed a few times before smiling weakly. “You know what they say,” he said. “Austrians are just Frenchmen who speak German.”

                “I’m certain that you’re the only one in the _world_ who says that.”

                The entire subject of nationality made Sasha think about Leo and his staunch aversion to being asked where he was from. “If Leo was here,” he said, “he would have flipped shit at what you just said.”

                “What, about Strasbourg?”

                Nodding, Sasha answered, “He abhors it when people don’t take the question of nationality seriously. I think that he’s insecure about not being from the mainland and having a weird accent.”

                Klemens looked from his simmering teapot back to Sasha. “We’re in Quebec. _Everyone_ has a weird accent. It’s egregious, really.”

                “You’re right…” sighed Sasha. The two were silent for a moment. The tea began to boil, and the soft roar of the beverage provided all of the sound in the apartment. Klemens put the back of his hand on Sasha’s forehead, and said, “You’re running a fever again.”

                “It’s horrible.” Sasha rested his head in his arms. “It’s as if the fevers of the past two years are taking their toll on me _now_. I’ve already drugged myself up as much as I can without experiencing severe damage to my internal organs.”

                “Does this tea have caffeine in it?” asked Klemens, pouring it into two cups. He handed one to Sasha.

                “It’s just mint and lemongrass. It’s pretty much just water.”

                “What do you want me to do?”

                “Keep me company and make sure that I don’t die?” Sasha didn’t feel as if he was asking a lot by setting up these parameters for what he needed. He continued, “You don’t have extra work to do, do you?” He was aware that Klemens often had hours of extra work to do outside of the law firm itself, and often spent his weekends doing nothing else.

                The Austrian shrugged. Of _course_ he had work to do, but since it was kind of his fault for dragging his younger friend into the rain, he would have to take responsibility for his actions. “I’ll wake up early to finish it,” he answered. “It’s been egregiously busy recently.”

                And so, it dawned on Sasha that Klemens might now have had all the time to spare on him. “If you don’t have time for me, then I completely…”

                “I can spare the time to make sure that you don’t die.” He reached out, and, gently taking Sasha’s hand, kissed it. He immediately regretted this decision and hoped that he wouldn’t fall ill, too. “Speaking of death, seriously, you’re running a fever.”

\---

                Meanwhile, in Montreal, Leo was kind of on a date. As in, he was on a date, but not in the romantic sense of the word, but to some extent he wished that it was. After Josephine had broken his heart once, Leo wouldn’t consider cheating on Sasha, whom he had grown so fond of over the past few months. So, essentially, he was in denial that he was on a date. Needless to say, he didn’t bother to inform her that he was already seeing someone, much less that he was currently in a homosexual relationship. It would have destroyed the mood.

                He briefly wondered if it was unethical to go out with Giuseppina’s roommate, but decided that if it was, he just didn’t care. Their first encounter had been after Leo’s first day of tedious conference, and much to Leo’s chagrin, it had been awkward. Because Mademoiselle George was an actress who had had two shows, she was too exhausted for their interaction to be positive in a meaningful way. They had met when Leo went to see how Giuseppina was doing after her grand upheaval.

                To his surprise, when he knocked on the door, a woman whom he had never seen opened it. She seemed as surprised as he was.

                “Good evening,” she had said, squinting into the light of the outside hallway. Keeping the door closed to all but her own figure, she examined Leo closely.

                “Good evening,” said Leo. “I’m looking for Giuseppina Grassini, I believe she lives here.”

                She glanced behind her, and then back at Leo. “She’s _home_ ,” she replied, “but it might not be best to disturb her right now.” She paused wondering in her fatigued state if it would be a good idea to invite this strange man into her home. When she was moving her things here, Giuseppina had mentioned something about a friend who might stop by to see her, so she just decided to assume the best. “Would you like to come in?” She opened the door further before holding out her hand to him. “Josephine-Marguerite George. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

                Leo took her hand and shook it firmly. “Napoleon Bonaparte. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance as well, Georgina. May I call you Georgina?” this was the first time in years that he had introduced himself as _Napoleon_ and not as _Leo_ to someone else.

                Because Georgina said nothing as he stepped inside, he assumed that she was okay with it. She invited him to sit down for a drink. While Leo declined and instead opted for water, she poured herself a glass of champagne anyway. Although the champagne seemed a bit extravagant, Leo supposed that it fit whatever details he could glean of the rest of her life; she owned a luxurious apartment in Montreal; she was an actress; she carried a unique, entrancing beauty, and whatever she wanted, it seemed as if she would get. Leo normally hated people who could do whatever they wanted with their lives, but Georgina so enraptured him with their short encounter that he forgot that he was supposed to care.

                Their conversation lasted for about twenty minutes, in which Georgina recounted to Leo how she had managed to become a successful actress in Montreal. She said that she one day wished to live in London or Paris, but feared that, as a French Canadian, she would stand out too negatively. Despite Leo’s tendency to be completely unsympathetic towards others, he understood well the sentiment of being an alien no matter he went. The two bonded, with Georgina believing that Leo was in touch with his emotions and Leo believing that he stood out in Georgina’s hand. In reality, Leo was more in touch with his desires than he ever had been with his emotions and Georgina was too filled with fatigue and ennui from being constantly flirted at for the conversation to have left anything more than a positive impression. Nevertheless, both of their notions of this unlikely dyad were so skewed that everything managed to work out, and by the time Leo left, they had a date set for a couple of days later.

                Leo never ended up seeing Giuseppina _or_ Arthur, but he was satisfied.

\---

                Sasha completely recovered from his feverish state to his normal self over the course of the next three days, in which he did nothing but drink tea, sleep, and watch shitty movies on his laptop computer. During that time, he couldn’t be bothered to read anything. He was left with nothing but a mild cough by the sixth and final day that Leo would be out of town, which was also the last day he figured he wouldn’t have to worry about seeing Klemens.

                What Klemens said to Sasha didn’t translate well, but the essential meaning could have been well summarized by, “Wanna bang?”. Although it wasn’t that vulgar at all, Sasha was still taken aback by his abrupt use of vulgarity. Nevertheless, he accepted the proposition.

                Sasha had never before felt physically incapacitated by someone else’s presence, but now all he could do was let Klemens do whatever he wanted to him. Even Klemens was surprised at how weak Sasha became for him; he thought it was kind of cute that he became physically incapacitated through the sheer extent of his longing. Sasha was a passionate lover, and gave Klemens more than he knew how to handle. He thought, however, that it was pathetic how profusely he melted at Klemens’s touch and how vulnerable he was when it came to Klemens’s love. And yet, he didn’t feel the same lust for Klemens that persisted in his relationship with Leo. Although he strove for a deeper sense of physical intimacy, he felt no need for sexual pleasure in itself. Perhaps it was because Leo already fulfilled him, but he felt that if he could have fully understood Klemens without making love to him, then he would have been content without any of it.

                Klemens, too, was weak for Sasha, but in an entirely different way. He knew that he was the dominant one in their relationship, and accordingly remained cautious that he never took advantage of Sasha. He treated him with a gentleness that he showed to no other being. Despite Sasha’s constant insistence that he wasn’t, Klemens still believed that he was a fragile being who needed to be treated delicately. Despite the fact that Sasha was both taller and stronger than him, he still intrinsically felt that he needed someone else’s protection. And Sasha, as weak for Klemens as he was, never once protested this subtle show of affection.

                Over the course of that week at the beginning of May, Sasha’s so-called _light, mild_ infidelity had nothing but intense and heavy-handed. He didn’t make excuses for his actions anymore. It just _was_ , and as long as he didn’t do anything to try to change it, everything would be fine.

\---

                When Leo returned home after a long seven days of conferencing and academia, the first thing he did was to present Sasha with the gift that he had gotten for him immediately before he left Montreal. Because Leo’s voyage was a work-related affair, Sasha hadn’t expected him to bring anything for him, and he was actually pleasantly surprised because of Leo’s adamant aversion to spending money.

                “A tea spoon!” he noted as he kissed Leo. It was an elegant silver tea spoon.  Because Sasha was a tea fanatic, he was used to receiving tea-related gifts, but still he was elated at having received one. He looked at Leo.

                “I love it. I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have nothing to give you unless you want some cold medicine, in which case, I have enough to last the next century.”

                Leo smiled and shook his head. “I don’t have any cold medicine because I haven’t been sick a day in my life.” Despite the frequency at which he told lies, this wasn’t one; he actually hadn’t had any sort of malady since he had recovered from a mild case of tuberculosis as a child. Although Sasha didn’t doubt it, he was surprised because given how bad Leo was at taking care of himself, his immune system should have been shit.

                He buried his face into the crook of Sasha’s neck and murmured, “It’s been a week.”

                Sasha, stroking Leo’s soft hair by nature of habit, agreed. “It’s been a week.”

                “What have you been up to?”

                “Other than dying, you mean?” Leo didn’t respond, and Sasha decided to sow a seed of truth. “I had Klemens over one day to nurse me back to health,” he admitted.

                Leo withdrew his face from Sasha’s neck, and, looked up at him. “What does that man even do with his time?” he wondered aloud. He thought that Klemens was generally an extremely boring man, and could hardly fathom why Sasha liked him so much. “Read legal books? Have missionary-style sex?”

                Although he wanted to be offended, Sasha laughed because Leo had hit the nail on the head with both of his guesses. “What have _you_ been up to for the entire past week?” he punctuated his question by kissing Leo’s hand.

                “Trying to figure out what the hell the squiggly line means.” He was quite fond of the ‘squiggly line’ joke and told it often. “It’s been boring. I’ve missed you.” As he said this, he realized that it was true; in some form or another, he had become dearly attached to Sasha, and it wasn’t even a bad thing.

                “I love you.” Sasha wasn’t expecting a response to this, but Leo whispered, “I love you, too. Despite everything.”

                He didn’t ask what “despite everything” referred to, but he felt a small wave of panic rise within him because although he could handle loving two people, he couldn’t handle _being_ loved by two people. Well, whatever. He could handle this internal crisis at a time when he _wasn’t_ about to get Leo to agree to have sex with him in the middle of the day.

                “ _I love you, Leo,”_ he kept on whispering senselessly, as if he was confused about what he was saying and what it meant. It was the first time he realized that he really loved Sasha; he really did, and this fact almost frightened him. “ _I love you_.”

                He didn’t know how he was meant to react when Leo kept on saying _“I love you_ ” back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I politically disagree with every single thing that Klemens von Metternich said or did in his entire life but tbh he was an OG.


	11. Three's a Crowd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fact of the matter was that Leo didn’t know anything about his sister other than the fact that her name was Caroline Buonaparte (nobody else had changed the spelling to Bonaparte) and what she looked like. He didn’t know what she liked to do, or whether she was as excited to see him as he was her. On the bus ride from here to the airport, all he could do was close his eyes, watch out for the moment when his stop would come, and wait. He restlessly waited the many long kilometers from the stop near his apartment to the airport.

 

                After months of waiting, finally the day came that Leo had the privilege of picking his sister up from the airport. After seven years of not seeing any of his family members, he was excited. He had marked his calendar months in advance for this wonderful first day in June, picked out furniture, and decorated the unused bedroom more nicely than any other part of the apartment. Despite the fact that they were siblings, they didn’t know each other well because they hadn’t grown up together; Leo had been sent to boarding school when he was ten years old, and Caroline was born when he was thirteen. Even after his family moved to Paris from Ajaccio, they weren’t close, and the last time he had seen her was when she was twelve and he was twenty-three. The only thing that distinctly stood out to him from their last encounters was when she had repeatedly told him that he should stop seeing Josephine, and to her credit, all of her negative impressions had been correct. Despite his anticipation, this darker aspect of his memories of her kept on prevailing, and he just hoped that she would approve of his relationship with Sasha. He wished that she would like Sasha, and vice versa. He kept on telling himself that of _course_ she would like Sasha, because everyone generally loved him, but the thought kept on nagging him. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had been so desperate for someone else’s approval, and perhaps he never had been before.

                The fact of the matter was that he didn’t know anything about his sister other than the fact that her name was Caroline Buonaparte (nobody else had changed the spelling to _Bonaparte_ ) and what she looked like. He didn’t know what she liked to do, or whether she was as excited to see him as he was her. On the bus ride from here to the airport, all he could do was close his eyes, watch out for the moment when his stop would come, and wait. He restlessly waited the many long kilometers from the stop near his apartment to the airport.

                He arrived at the airport twenty minutes early, and spent his down time sitting on one of the benches and watching the others in the place walk to and fro. The entire place was unfamiliar to him, and, as all airports are, uncomfortable. The sounds of heels clacking and wheels rolling on the synthetic floors greatly disturbed him, and even more so as he was already riddled with a queer sense of anxiety. Words of reunion and frustration from strangers clashed as they met in the air. The rules of the airport imposed an artificial sense of uniformity upon all of the people here, but all of their motives were too different to create anything akin to an organic environment. At one point, Leo stood up and walked around for a few minutes, but despite his discomfort, he waited. He hadn’t felt this deeply apprehensive since the last time that he was at an airport, which was five years ago.

                When the moment of their reunion finally came, it wasn’t Leo who sought out Caroline as he had so imagined, but instead Caroline who had sought out Leo. Hoisting a backpack and dragging a suitcase behind her, she had quickly made out his figure among the crowd of people waiting and called his name.

                “ _Napoleone!”_ she called, adding the distinct Italian flair to his name that he had forgotten long ago. She ran to him, and the two siblings embraced after five years apart. After seeing her, all of Leo’s anxieties fled him; he could still see in her traces of the thirteen-year old whom he had seen last.

\---

                The entire way home was filled with chatter and five years’ worth of catch up.

                “So, when’s Pauline getting married?” Leo asked, referring to his nineteen-year-old sister. He didn’t know the details of her engagement, but he was still in a fury about how she, his favorite sibling, had the _audacity_ to get engaged so young.

                Caroline shrugged. “Probably sometime next spring, but we don’t know for sure. None of us have met him aside from Mama, and she certainly doesn’t like him. And what have _you_ been doing for the past five years?”

                “I can’t tell you everything about the past five years, but a year or two ago I lost my job, worked as a barista for a while, separated with Josephine, lived in an awful place for a few months, got an actual job, and got an actual apartment again.” He smiled. “And now I’m here, but I got a few good things from all of it. I have a roommate, actually, but I’m sure you’ll like him. Everyone does. So what have _you_ been up to? And the rest of the family and everyone in France? Other than Pauline, of course.”

                Smiling back at him, she replied, “You know. Same old, same old, same as ever. In terms of recent developments, I think that Lucien joined the communist party. You have to be more specific when you ask.” Lucien was another one of the Buonaparte siblings, and Leo’s least favorite by a long shot. Whenever Sasha spoke about Kostya, Leo thought instantly of Lucien.

                “I’m so glad you’re here,” Leo said.

                “I’m glad that I’m here, too. And that you decided to move to North America even though all of us told you that it was a stupid idea.”

                When they got home, before Caroline had any time to look around the apartment, Leo showed her to her room, which was somewhat small but comfortable. He hadn’t bothered decorating beyond the essential furniture, but the walls were a shade of green-blue that was pleasant enough on its own.

                “You’re probably tired and want to change clothes and take a nap and whatnot, so I’ll leave you alone for a few hours,” Leo said. “The bathroom is across the hall. Are you hungry?”

                Caroline shook her head, even though she was actually kind of hungry.

                “Okay,” said Leo, exiting and closing the door behind him. “Tell me if you need anything.” When he exited the room, he was startled by the visage of the Renoir lady staring directly into his face, and decided that he would move that painting now or later.

\---

                “I’m home!” Sasha called out when he came home from work. He, too, was kind of nervous to meet Leo’s sister, for he knew that he would have to win her approval for their entire relationship to keep working. He knew that his fears were probably irrational; as far as his knowledge went, nobody had ever actively disliked him; nevertheless, this experience was still nerve-wracking. Upon his arrival, he went to the kitchen, where he heard sounds of excited chatter from Leo and a voice that he assumed belonged to Caroline.

                He went quietly, feeling awkward and almost alienated from the other two. ‘ _In my own fucking house,’_ he internally grumbled to himself. ‘ _Well, technically it’s not mine because I never signed the lease, but whatever.’_

“Hey,” he said to Leo and Caroline at the same time. Both siblings turned around to face him at the same time, and he couldn’t help but notice how similar their mannerisms were; they both seemed to mimic each other in their inflections, tones of voice, and the way that they both used their hands to speak. The only significant difference that Sasha could immediately point out was that while Leo had an accent that was all his own, Caroline’s was purely French.

Leo stood up in order to introduce them to each other. “Sasha, this is my sister, Caroline,” he said, “and Caroline, this is my close friend and roommate, Sasha.”

                As they shook hands, Caroline asked Sasha, “Is Sasha short for anything?”

                “It’s short for Alexandre.” Sasha was still kind of galled by the fact that Leo had introduced him as his _close friend_. They had a conversation earlier that week in which Leo had essentially told him, ‘ _Don’t do any gay shit until I know for certain that Caroline won’t react badly to it.’_ Leo thought it would be for the better, so it probably _was_ for the better, but the idea still shook him deeply; he’d spent the first twenty-two years of his life suppressing all of his romantic and sexual feelings, and now he had to do it again within his own home? It was ridiculous, really.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

                “Nice to meet you.” Caroline took a long glance at Sasha, and Sasha took a long glance at her.

                He was actually impressed at how closely she resembled Leo; they had the same round face, the same dark hair, and the same ghostly pale skin. Of course, they also had acute differences which set them distinctly apart; Leo’s face was far more angular than hers was, her hair was long and pulled back, and her eyes were round and open rather than hard and perennially scrutinizing. She wasn’t as lean as Leo was, but given that Leo only ever had full meals when Sasha forced him to, this was a good thing. Most of all, however, Caroline was _young_. Her skin was incredibly smooth. She didn’t have the fine lines around her mouth that Leo had so developed. Sasha realized that he had never actually seen a photo of Leo from before the age of twenty-five, and wondered if he had ever been as lovely as his sister was now.

                Caroline took instantly to Sasha upon seeing him. In her mind’s eye, she had envisioned him as extremely masculine and kind of old, but the man who stood in front of her now looked to be gentle and only a few years older than she was. His eyes were soft and gave him the impression of someone who tried to understand everything, but couldn’t due to inexperience. The power of observation was another tenet which ran in the Bonaparte family, and it wasn’t difficult for Caroline to understand that Leo was in love with Sasha and _why_ he was in love with Sasha. She was pleased with him, and this shone in her eyes enough that Sasha was relieved that it had been so easy to win her over.

\---

                Because Caroline and Sasha were relatively close in age and shared some similar interests, the two of them bonded almost instantly. As virtual strangers connected only through Leo’s love and affection, all of their interactions for the first few days that they knew each other had been awkward; neither of them knew what to say to each other or how to act. The little time that they spent together without Leo’s presence passed by in silence. Eventually, it got to the point where Sasha searched on the internet, “ _how to befriend your boyfriend’s sister”._ Of course, he found nothing actually helpful, and decided to take matters into his own hands.

                And so, one day when Leo was out of the apartment, he asked Caroline over breakfast, “Do you want to see a movie with me and then get coffee or something?” He internally cringed because it sounded too much like he was asking her on a date, but at the same time he firmly believed that movies were always good tools for breaking down barriers between people.

                “Sure, which one?” she asked. “The new _Star Trek_ just came into theaters, and if you hadn’t already picked one, I’d like to see it.”

                Sasha nodded, and he was happy that Caroline was a _Star Trek_ fan because he hadn’t done any research on whatever was in theaters. “Yeah, that sounds good,” he said. “Do you want to go at three-ish?”

                “Sounds good,” Caroline replied.

                “So you like _Star Trek?”_

                She had to think about it for a second. “It’s okay. It’s not my favorite, but it’ll fly.” She smiled at her pun. “What about you?”

                “I don’t know the first thing about it,” admitted Sasha. “I don’t know a lot about movies. I haven’t seen one in theaters in years.” The only time that he could recall really being interested in film was when he had been sick and spent an entire doing nothing but watching shitty movies. That had been a personal low point.

                “What do you do?” Caroline asked. She felt that this was a good time to get to know her brother’s _close friend and roommate_ , and found it necessary because they lived together. Her secret hobby was to deduce as much as she could about the people around her without going to any extraordinary lengths, and she found this both a useful and interesting hobby. So far, she had made a mental list of things about Sasha without actually ever having had a conversation with him, and had figured out that he liked nineteenth century Russian literature, cooking, tea, and French impressionism.

                “I _work_ as a barista, but I suppose that in my free time I mostly read and figure skate.” After his years-long drought from figure skating, Sasha had finally gotten a membership to an indoor ice rink last month and had been re-perfecting all of the skills that had worn down from disuse. He had started going down there most days for an hour and a half or so at a time, and had even made friends with some of the other people there. “What do _you_ do?” he asked. He knew that he was being lazy by reflecting her own question back at her, but it was just the most effective way to do it.

                This time, Caroline didn’t hesitate before answering. “I watch a lot of documentaries,” she said, “and do calligraphy. I used to play chess pretty often, but now I’m limited to playing it online. What got you into figure skating?”

                “I’ve just been doing it since I was young enough to stand on skates,” shrugged Sasha, “and quit for a while when I was twenty, and just started doing it again last month because I needed to get in shape and leave the house more.”

                Caroline sighed, and took a sip of the now-cold herbal tea that Sasha had made for breakfast. “I’m always envious of the people who have been pursuing the same thing since they were really young. I didn’t start doing any of the things that I do now until I was fifteen and figured out _how_ I could manage to do anything that I liked.”

                “What do you mean?” asked Sasha. Caroline’s half-wistful, half-bitter tone towards her previous years paralleled the same way that Leo sounded when he spoke of his own adolescence. The moment after he asked Caroline what she meant by not really being able to do anything, everything clicked in his mind in a staunch burst of realization. All of Leo’s behaviors which he had previously just dismissed as odd things that he did made sense to him. Caroline’s wistful bitterness now explained Leo’s aversion to spending money, his ability to go inhumanly long period of time without eating anything, the way he watered down all of his wine, his meticulousness when it came to minutes of international calls, his story about eating raw instant coffee, and his near-obsession with providing for his family. And Sasha now felt terrible for dismissing all of Leo’s seemingly weird behaviors, because it now seemed so obvious that he and Caroline had both grown up in poverty.

                Caroline didn’t answer his question.

\---

                When the time came around and Sasha and Caroline were at the movie theater, they were instantly turned away because the show was sold out. Neither of them really wanted to watch a different movie, so instead of spending the two hours in a cramped theater, they decided to spend the sunny day wandering around the streets of the city. Because it was fairly close to where Sasha used to live, he knew the scenery almost by heart.

                Because she had spent the past two days sorting her affairs and overcoming her jetlag, this was Caroline’s first time really out of the house since she had been here. She had spent most of the plane ride here listening to Quebecois podcasts in order to get accustomed to the accent and dialect, but still she found it difficult to get used to it. She understood well that she was the alien here, that _her_ accent was the one that was abnormal. She supposed that she would get used to it eventually, because whenever Sasha spoke, he no longer seemed to notice that he didn’t fit the paradigm of a Canadian French speaker. If anything, the softness of his voice assimilated him to the language around him.

                The two ended up going to a coffee place nearby that Sasha was fond of and then strolled around for a bit longer in this bourgeois part of the city. Caroline wasn’t particularly talkative and they still had little in common other than their relationships with Leo, but the two formed a silent bond of mutual respect and friendship. If anything, Caroline actually felt more comfortable around Sasha than she did around her brother because he didn’t have any personal expectations for her to live up to; she could just be. At the end of the day, both of them were glad to have a new companion.

\---

                Because Leo was an inherently jealous person, he soon grew jealous of the fact that Sasha was closer to his sister than he was. Because he was logical, however, he tried to convince himself that it was just the natural way of things; they lived together, did essentially everything together, and were closer in age to each other than Leo and Sasha were to each other. It made sense, but enraged him nonetheless.

                And Sasha could kind of tell that his close relationship with Caroline pissed Leo off more and more by the day; oftentimes, he would blatantly try to avoid both of them if they were together. This went on for about a week until he finally broke and just asked Sasha, “Is it even normal for a twenty-three-year-old gay man and an eighteen-year-old girl to be spending this much time together?”, to which Sasha merely answered, “Yes, of _course_ it’s normal.”

                It wasn’t normal, and he knew it. Yet, he didn’t know how to answer this question to Leo’s liking. He wanted to say that given their nontraditional living arrangement he didn’t realize that normalcy was so important to Leo, but he knew that it would only piss him off even more, so the conversation just ended there.

                It was the first time that Sasha truly realized that there were things that he couldn’t or didn’t want to tell Leo for the sake of their relationship, and this fact saddened him more than anything else. Leo wanted to hear what he wanted to hear, and there was no way of working around it. Whether it was something as menial as this or as magnitudinous as his séance with Klemens, there was no working around it. It was now that he understood that the _reason_ that he couldn’t find himself utterly smitten with Leo and the _reason_ that part of him had fallen for someone else wasn’t because he was an inherently terrible person, but that the part of himself that he shared with Klemens was the candid part of him that he knew would offend Leo. It was the part of himself that had brought him so close to Caroline in the first place, and it was the part of him that he knew that Leo, if he ever came into direct contact with it, would never be able to tolerate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear it gets better


	12. Abrasion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hot outside, Klemens comes over for dinner at the B(u)onaparte-Romanov household, Leo is happy even though he runs into his ex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter uses the word "love" about twenty-five times and the word "fuck" zero times stay tuned

                Two weeks passed, and everyone was forcibly shoved out of the delicate balance of spring and forced instead into the abhorrible heat of summer. It had rained four times in the past week, and the sweaty air outside dragged the entire city down. On the first day of clear weather, the blueness of the sky mercilessly mocked everyone who had prayed for warm weather during the long winter. Everyone in the B(u)onaparte-Romanov household resented the onset of summer, and the insufferable nature of the heat and humidity combined brought them all together.

                While Leo and Caroline could handle the heat well enough, Sasha began to stop functioning at anything above twenty-three degrees. “The weather is never this tyrannical back home,” he said, unsure as to how he was going to put up with it any longer without actually overheating and dying.

                “Sasha, they call the Russian winter, ‘ _General Snow,’_ for a reason, you know.”

                “The winters can be brutal, perhaps, but it’s _never_ this hot or humid.”

                Leo, who was meticulously tidying up the room, would have suggested for Sasha to hit the ice rink and take a cold shower, but he had just finished doing both of the above. He glanced down at Sasha from where he stood by the window and sprayed the glass cleaner onto it. It was rare for Sasha, usually so graceful and elegant, to complain about something this intensely. “You grew up in a port city,” Leo said with a hint of scorn. “What right do you have to complain about the humidity?”

                “Yeah, but in Petersburg it was usually nineteen degrees in the summer, not _twenty-five!”_ Sasha paused. “And _you_ grew up in a port city, too, but you complain about the weather all the time.”

                “I only spent ten years in Ajaccio,” Leo protested, “and then went to school in northern France and lived in Paris after that, so I have just as much right to complain about it as you do.”

                “Well, then, why don’t you let me turn on the air conditioning?”

                “Why don’t you go somewhere that’s air conditioned?”

                Sasha groaned again, this time even more dramatically than before. “I’ll _burn_!”

                Leo changed the subject from Sasha’s general weakness when it came to the heat. “You should invite Klemens over for dinner one of these days,” he said.

                Sasha, instantly forgetting about the torment of the weather, turned his head abruptly towards Leo. “I thought you didn’t like Klemens,” he said.

                “I never said that I don’t like Klemens,” Leo replied, frowning. “If anything, I’m inclined to like him because he’s your friend… even though his only interests seem to be legal textbooks and missionary sex.”

                “So why do you want me to ask him over to dinner?”

                For once in his entire relationship with Sasha, Leo genuinely had no ulterior motives; he was being nice for the sake of being nice, which was a rare occurrence. He didn’t understand why Sasha was being so deeply defensive about the entire matter. “I just thought it would be nice,” he said, “because he’s your friend, and I haven’t seen him in a few months, and he lives alone and probably gets lonely, and Caroline might like to meet him.”

                Leo and Klemens hadn’t seen each other since Giuseppina’s birthday celebration because Klemens had been trying to avoid him as much as possible. Sasha, however, had been seeing Klemens more than he ever had been; sometimes when he said that he was out at the library, figure skating, or just wandering around, he would actually just go and see Klemens.

                Leo continued, “You should ask Maria if she wants to come over as well. We’ll have a nice time.” Although he had only met Maria twice, he was quite fond of her, and she was his favorite one of Sasha’s friends. Lately they had had a slew of friends and acquaintances over for dinner, including but not limited to Arthur, Antoine, Giuseppina and Georgina when they came to town for a weekend, a couple of Sasha’s friends from the ice rink, and even Leo’s coworker-or-something Auguste Cambacérès. Sasha decided that he would ask over Klemens one day to satisfy Leo, but that he would leave Maria out of the entire affair. She could come over some other day.

                ‘ _So this is what it’s like to live a domestic lifestyle,’_ he thought.

\---

                As of late Klemens had fallen more madly in love with Sasha then he presumably already was, so the entire dynamic when he actually came over to dinner the next day was awkward. Sasha was socially graceful and amiable in general, Leo came off as a bit more abrasive but greatly sociable nonetheless, but the way that Klemens interacted with the people around him could be so varied that no one knew what to expect of him; would he be charming this time around? Would he be the hyper-inflated, conceited version of himself that nobody could stand to be around? Would he remain aloof and emotionally distant from everyone around him? Nobody knew, and for Sasha, this was horribly nerve-wracking.

                When Caroline first met him, her reaction to him was remarkably similar to Sasha’s; she thought that he seemed intelligent and that he was handsome, but that his nose was kind of awkward and threw off the balance of the rest of his face. Nevertheless, it was evident to everyone that she was rather taken by him from the moment that they met.

                “So, how do you all know each other?” she asked, gesturing at Klemens, Sasha, and Leo when they sat down to have a nice family dinner. Leo had taken the trouble to open a bottle of decent wine for the occasion, although, as usual, he had watered his down until it could hardly be called _wine_.

                Leo decided to answer. “Well, you know how Sasha is _my_ boyfriend?” he asked. About a week ago he realized that it was pointless to continue to pretend that he and Sasha were just close friends, as Caroline was too shrewd to believe it.

                “Yeah…” She looked confused, unsure where Leo was going with this.

                “Well,” he said, “Klemens is _Sasha’s_ boyfriend.”

                Sasha froze. Was this, he wondered, Leo’s way of telling him that he knew everything all along? He didn’t dare glance at Klemens, for it would have been far too suspicious. However, in that moment he reasoned with himself that _if_ Leo had figured something out, he wouldn’t have been so tactless with it. And, of course, this was exactly the genre of humor that he enjoyed.

                “Wait, what?” asked Caroline again. She hadn’t yet gotten accustomed to Leo’s terrible jokes.

                He shook his head, as if the other three at the dinner table had failed to understand something incredibly simple and obvious. “Not really. Klemens is Sasha’s best friend.”

                “ _Napoleone_ , your sense of humor is egregious. It’s just awful.” She turned to Klemens, who seemed slightly paler than he had been before. “And _Monsieur Clément_ , what do you do for a living?”

                “I’m a lawyer,” Klemens answered as casually as he could. He didn’t know why, and he had absolutely no reason to, but he felt the same need to win her over that Sasha had so felt when they first met. “And you don’t have to call me _Monsieur._ Just Klemens, or _Clément_ ,” he said, pronouncing his name in Caroline’s stereotypically French fashion, “is fine. What are you planning on studying at university?”

                Caroline answered, “French and English,” as she always did when she was asked what she planned to study, but she had barely been paying attention to anything for the length of this dinner; instead, she could only think about Klemens and how wonderfully charming he was. She knew that it was wrong and bad and that she _shouldn’t_ have a crush on Sasha’s best friend, or whatever their relationship was, but by the time the ordeal was all over he had already enamored her to the point of no return.

\---

                The next day, Leo, by himself, went on a walk with no obvious destination or purpose. With three people in the house now, it wasn’t often that he found himself alone and at rest, but now he allowed his mind to wander beyond the wants and needs of himself and of everyone around him. It reminded him of the first time that he had spent real time with Sasha, and how he walked alone to the park with the fountain with the three women on it desperately trying to forget Josephine. (Inevitably, whenever he let his mind wander, it always came back to Josephine.)

                He hadn’t seen her in months, and wondered where she was and what she was doing. It had only been ten months since they had left each other, and everything in his life had so drastically shifted within that time that he could pinpoint the end of their relationship as the time from which his current satisfaction came about. That was the main difference between his case a year ago and now: with all of the positive change that had come about, he was happier now than he ever had been before.

                He then thought back on his tactless joke about Klemens being Sasha’s boyfriend. Although Sasha’s anxiety in the moment had been little and he ultimately hadn’t been too obvious, Leo immediately noticed the way that Klemens’s entire body tensed up as he said it. It brought his memory back the Christmas party at the co-op six months ago, when he had first noticed Klemens’s interest in Sasha. He then recalled that time just a few months ago when Sasha had broken down crying over the fact that Klemens was married and hadn’t told him.

                Through his observations over these two periods of time, he came to three successive conclusions: that Sasha knew that Klemens was madly in love with him, that they had reciprocated romantic feelings for each other at some point, and that Sasha didn’t want Leo to know how Klemens felt about him. This was why he had been so hesitant to ask Klemens over to dinner: he thought that it was too obvious. Yet, despite these conclusions, Leo chose to think that Klemens’s love for Sasha didn’t affect the platonic nature of their relationship. Despite what he had said a few days before about how he was _inclined_ to like Klemens because he was Sasha’s friend, however, if anything, he was now certain that he didn’t like him at all.

                But perhaps, he thought, it was impossible to know Sasha and not fall in love with him at least little bit. Despite the fact that he had only started this relationship for his own sexual gratification, he had fallen in love with him very organically and without noticing or acknowledging that which so deeply overtook him. Sasha was, quite simply, everything to him, and his new life had all come together with Sasha as the cornerstone upon which it all rested.

                It had been a slow realization, but it suddenly dawned on Leo when they were going about their routines as usual and he looked at Sasha and thought, ‘ _I love him so much.’_ When he wondered if he had any ulterior motives to love Sasha, he found none. He loved him because he loved him, which he thought was impossible after everything with Josephine. Sasha may have been young and inexperienced in essentially all walks of life, but his presence kept Leo from the unrelenting ennui that he had so felt before. And for perhaps the first time in his life, he was happy with where he was. Surrounded by people he _knew_ loved him and needed him, he was happier than he had ever been in his life.

\---

                Yet another few days later, Sasha made plans to go out drinking with Klemens when he realized that, because of the tumult of the past few weeks, he hadn’t gone out with or done anything with Leo in a _long_ time. While they saw each other all the time because they lived together, they just didn’t get the same time alone that they used to. This hadn’t created any rift in between them yet, of course, and Sasha didn’t want to take the chance. But because he didn’t want to cancel on Klemens, he decided to go anyway and talk to Leo tomorrow or the day after.

                That afternoon, when Sasha made tea for everyone before they went their separate ways (a personal tradition that Leo and Caroline had eventually picked up on), he asked Leo out of politeness, “Leo, I’m going to the bar with Klemens tonight, do you want to come?” even though he knew that Leo would say _no_ , because he had evidently begun to dislike Klemens.

                “Eh, no thanks,” replied Leo. “One of my coworkers has a really nice home theater, apparently, and invited me to watch a film with him.”

                “Isn’t that a bit juvenile?” asked Caroline. She whispered something to Leo in Corsican, which seemed to surprise Leo a bit. Sasha _really_ didn’t like it when they spoke to each other in their native language when he was around, but because it only occasionally ever happened, he could live with it.

                “Anyway, Caroline, do you want to come?” he then asked, figuring that she would say no, too. He thought it would be okay to ask because she was eighteen, and therefore of legal drinking age.

                Before she could answer, however, Leo vetoed the proposition with a stern “ _No.”_ None of them said anything after that for a few minutes, because nobody wanted to make a scene.

\---

                Later, Leo and Sasha were both getting ready to leave the house when Leo brought it up again.

                “Sasha,” he said, buttoning up his shirt, “you can’t just ask my sister if she wants to drink with you.”

                Sasha leaned against the closet door, ready to go, and looked at Leo. This probably wouldn’t escalate into a full-fledged argument, but the tension was definitely there. “Well, she’s of drinking age and we’re friends, so why not?” he defended himself. “You know that I would look out for her. And anyway, you were fine with her drinking wine a few days ago.”

                Leo closed his dresser drawer a little more forcefully than he usually did. “That was _different_ , because that was _in the house._ ” He enunciated the words _in the house_ with great enthusiasm. “I just don’t feel comfortable with my younger sister getting drunk with you and Klemens.” Of _course_ this was about Klemens’s presence, but he was too proud to admit it. “I mean, she’s only eighteen.”

                Leo had a point, and perhaps Sasha would have accepted it from someone else, but from _Leo_ he found it absolutely ludicrous. “Weren’t you eighteen when you seduced a prostitute on the streets of Paris?” he asked, getting a little too _ad hominem_ for Leo’s liking. “Furthermore, didn’t you get _engaged_ to an eighteen-year-old?”

                “Both mistakes!” Leo exclaimed. “That could have ended infinitely worse than they did!”

                “And you think that something infinitely worse is going to happen if she goes out with an attorney and a guy who could pick _you_ up and throw up into a trash can?” The trash can thing was perhaps too humorous for what he was going for, but he had often before wondered whether he could pick Leo up and throw him into a trash can if he really wanted to and thus seemed fitting.

                “There is _no way_ ,” Leo argued back, “that _you_ could pick me up and throw me into a trash can.”

                “Leo, I’m twenty-three centimeters taller than you are and in shape. I could definitely pick you up and throw you into a trash can.”

                “You underestimate me.” Leo’s voice again picked up that tone of arrogance that all-too-often left Sasha wondering if he was actually a narcissist or just seemed that way sometimes.

                “Do you want to _try_?” he asked. He began to see the humor in this situation but tried to maintain his serious appearance.

                “You know what?” Leo asked. “I dare you to try.”

                And then, in what seemed like a single fluid motion, Sasha walked across the room, picked Leo up bridal-style without any resistance, and carried him to their kitchen.

                ‘ _No,’_ he thought, ‘ _this trash can is too small. It just won’t do.’_ A small smile broke out on his face, but he turned so that Leo couldn’t see it.

                “Sasha, you are _not_ throwing me into that trash can. It’s too small.” Leo decided that he kind of liked being carried like this and still gave Sasha absolutely no resistance.

                “You’re right.”

                Sasha kept on walking, and carefully carried Leo out of the apartment, which he didn’t even bother to lock.

                “Wait,” Leo objected, “where are you going? You didn’t even lock the door.”

                In any case, he proceeded to be carried down several flights of stairs, out of the building, and across the street, where there _was_ a large enough trash can for Leo to be mercilessly thrown into. Although Sasha’s persistence annoyed him, he was also impressed at his commitment and physical strength.

                “Okay, Leo,” said Sasha once he stood in front of the trash can. “I’m going to throw you in now.”

                Leo didn’t say anything, but clung onto his partner for dear life until he was finally set down. And, to his surprise, Sasha broke down laughing. And Leo, despite himself, laughed with him. The reason that they had worked so well together so far was not only their overwhelming lack of arguments, but that they were both able to see the ridiculousness of situations when they arose.

                When they were done laughing, Leo finally admitted, “Okay, you win, Sasha, you can ask my sister if she wants to drink with you.” It was one of the few times that he had ever admitted his defeat to Sasha.

                “You already know that I love you too much to throw you into a trash can.”

                “I love you too much to let you throw me into a trash can. What do you want to do now?” he asked.

                “Well, since we’re already out of the house and I left my keys in there,” Sasha noted, “I’ll cancel my plans if you cancel yours and we can do something together.”

                “Deal,” said Leo, and they shared a long kiss before doing so.

\---

                After a discussion that was lengthier than it had to be, Leo and Sasha finally decided to have dinner in the old part of the city and then walk along the city walls. Although it was simple, it was nice, and neither of them had the means to do anything particularly lavish like drink twenty dollar cocktails at the trendy wine-and-cheese bar that they had both heard about.

                Or, at least, they would have if it hadn’t started pouring rain during the former part of their plans. While Leo had been savvy enough to bring an umbrella, Sasha hadn’t been and didn’t want to get drenched after what had happened last time. Besides, it was _cold_ outside, so Leo didn’t particularly want to spend time outside either.

                “We could go to the bar next door,” suggested Sasha. “But I know that you don’t really drink, so…” The bar brought his mind back to the fact that he had completely bailed on Klemens to spent time with Leo, and if anything, he thought that it was one of his best decisions yet; he had forgotten how much he loved spending time with Leo.

                Leo shrugged. “Yeah, let’s go,” he said. “It’ll be fun. I like watching drunk people.”

                Before responding, Sasha paused for a second. “Or,” he reconsidered, “we could go to a gay bar.”

                Leo visibly winced a little bit, hoping that Sasha wouldn’t notice. “I’ve never been to a gay bar, and to be frank, I don’t want to go to one.” This just brought up a new issue that Leo had been avoiding thinking about for months: the fact that the only part of himself that he didn’t think he really understood was his sexuality.

\---

                When they were at the bar, Sasha asked Leo, “Leo, have you ever thought about how your _name_ is Leo and your star sign is Leo, too?”

                “Yes,” replied Leo, “I’ve actually thought about it a lot.”

                It didn’t surprise Sasha; among his daily ritual of reading the newspaper was reading his horoscope every day, and sometimes he read Sasha’s to him without his ever having asked.

                Sasha scoffed. “I still can’t believe that you believe in that sort of thing. Like, aren’t you a particle physicist? Don’t you know that it doesn’t _work_ that way?”

                However, Leo wasn’t about to let Sasha best him again after the trash can incident. “I _am_ a particle physicist,” he replied, “but that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy horoscopes like the average man…” After seeing something from the corner of his eye, he abruptly turned his face away from where he had been looking before.

                “…Leo?” asked Sasha. “Are you okay? You stopped mid-sentence.”

                Leo closed his eyes, as if to answer. “Oh, don’t look now,” he said. But Sasha looked, and made direct eye contact with someone whom he vaguely recognized from the past. He saw a faint trace of recognition flicker over her face, but thankfully, she didn’t seem to remember what she recognized him from. Unthankfully, she then saw Leo beside him and locked him under a glance of heavy scrutiny.

                “Is that…?”

                Leo’s voice came out not only rough and grating as it sometimes had the tendency to be, but slightly strained as well. “My ex, Josephine… We’re on really bad terms.” He talked about Josephine sometimes, but he never really _said_ anything about her. “Let’s just ignore the fact that she’s here and burn that bridge if it comes to it.”

                The two of them continued to have a semi-normal conversation for a while, until Josephine finally seemed to realize that she was standing just a few feet away from her still-bitter ex.

                “Napoleon,” she said suddenly, causing Leo to turn around. Sasha had met her maybe once or twice before, but they were brief, meaningless interactions which he barely remembered. “You’re… here.”

                “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

                “It has been months,” Josephine admitted. “Who’s this?” she then asked, gesturing to Sasha.

                Leo looked at Sasha briefly before answering. “This is my…” he didn’t say _close friend and roommate_ this time. Instead, he intertwined his fingers with Sasha’s and said, “This is my partner, Sasha.” He spoke spitefully, and although Sasha normally would have been happy for Leo to introduce him as his _partner_ , this entire encounter was too contrived to be pleasant. Sasha wanted to leave immediately, but nevertheless, he stayed.

                Josephine then glanced at Sasha and asked him, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” She was unreadable.

                “Leo and I, we used to work together at _La Republique.”_ While Sasha badly wanted to vilify her and see her as nothing more than a blackguard for having broken Leo’s heart, really interacting with her for the first time was also the first time that it really dawned on him that if she was a villain for cheating on Leo, then he was, too.

                “I got a new job in my field,” said Leo before Josephine could ask about the _used to_. “What have you been up to?”

                “I’m still a florist. Hortense is here for the summer, but Eugène is working an internship in Montreal. You know how it is.”

                “I do.” There was an awkward paused in the conversation, because there was nothing left for either of them to talk about. “I’m glad we had this conversation.”

                “It’s been nice to see you.” Josephine said, and both of them turned around and walked away from the cursed spot. Leo continued to grip Sasha’s hand, but he now gripped it much more tightly than he initially had.

                Sasha wondered how it was possible for Leo, who seemed to be so madly in love with Josephine less than a year ago, to treat her so coldly. The words _less than a year_ rang in his mind over and over again as he realized that although he felt as though he had been in love with Leo for a lifetime, just ten months ago they had been nothing but isolated co-workers. They had loved each other for perhaps five months of it. He was left with a strange, surreal melancholy over the fact that he had been in love with Leo for so short a time and that in that time, so much had changed. Leo and Josephine had been together for seven _years_. Sasha had only been with Leo for seven _months_ , and now he came to wondering how much Leo really loved him and if their relationship would fall to its ruin so quickly and so gravely.

                And when he thought about how dearly he loved and wanted to be with Leo, he didn’t once think about Klemens. He only had a premonition that something was _wrong_ , dearly _wrong_ , and that it was his fault.

\---

                When that night they came home, there were many things on Sasha’s mind, but perhaps one of the most pressing was that now would be a better time than ever to get laid, if not just to take his mind off of all of the tumult of the previous day.

                Five minutes after the two of them arrived home, Sasha was pressing Leo up against one of the walls of their apartment and kissing him in a blind fury. Leo’s shirt and belt were already in a pile on the ground, and Sasha’s shirt was halfway unbuttoned.

                “Sasha…” Leo protested in between kisses, “there are better places to do this… what if my sister gets home…” But Sasha neglected to listen to him and continued to do what he was doing.

                It wasn’t until both he and Leo were almost fully unclothed that they heard the loud click of the door unlocking, and before they could do anything, Caroline opened the door. She stared at both of them for a moment, sighed, and said, “I’ll go now,” before leaving again.

                Sasha, who was now blushing excessively, said, “I’m surprised that that’s actually the first time that’s happened.”

                Leo rolled his eyes and just replied, “I _told_ you that would happen.”

                “Well, what’s done is done.”

                “I suppose you’re right. We might as well finish what we started.” Leo traced his fingers over Sasha’s smooth skin, paying careful attention to the sunflower tattoo on his left shoulder. “I love your tattoo so much,” he mumbled as he wrapped his arms around Sasha’s shoulders and leaned up to kiss him again. “I love you so much.”

                “I love me so much, too…” Sasha whispered. “I’m pretty great. But in all seriousness, I love you, too, Leo. I don’t know what I would be doing…” He paused mid-sentence to stare at Leo’s body. He was so pale that his skin bore more of a resemblance to marble than to anything else. After they continued to kiss and feel each other up for another few minutes, Leo finally began to feel Sasha’s nimble fingers tread against his waistline.

                “Sasha,” said Leo. Sasha knew exactly what Leo was going to say, because he made a point to say it before they ever did anything sexual in nature. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

                Sasha nodded. “I’m sure,” he stated, exactly the same way as he always did. He then paused, and after a few seconds, nodded. He repeated, almost the same as he had said before, “I’m sure.” Leo couldn’t tell whether Sasha actually said it with less confidence the second time or whether he just imagined it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion question: what do you think about Josephine in the story? or just in real life?


	13. A Turning Point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Klemens should have been ashamed of everything he was doing, and this much, he knew, was certain. However, he felt no shame for himself. He should have felt ashamed of the fact that he was an infidel, but he didn’t. He should have felt ashamed of the fact that he had practically been toying with a younger man who was far less experienced than he was, but he didn’t. He should have felt ashamed of so many things, but he didn’t. Klemens von Metternich didn’t see any reason for himself to follow the rules that he imposed on other people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> >:)

                Sasha frowned as he spoke to Klemens. “I think that Arthur once told me that I’m not hot enough to be a male stripper,” he recounted. “It was a while ago and I didn’t really think about what he said at the time, but now that I think about I’m pretty sure that that’s what he meant.”

                “That’s such a typically _Arthur_ thing to say,” Klemens scoffed. It was a chilly, mostly cloudy day outside, and it had rained earlier in the day so the ground was still wet and even soggy in some places. Klemens and Sasha, however, liked to be alone together when there were few other people outside, and decided to go for lunch and a long promenade along one of the more peaceful stretches of the riverbank. It was around here that they had confessed to each other and kissed passionately just a month or two ago, but it felt like a much longer time than that had passed since they began to more openly express their love to each other.

                “I don’t know,” continued Sasha, “I _like_ and _trust_ him-“

                “-…an entry-level mistake,” Klemens interjected.

“… but I also think he’s a bit, what’s the right way to say this…”

                “Gay?”

                Sasha nodded. “Yeah. I think that deep down, he’s just not as hetero as he thinks he seems to other people.”

                Smirking, Klemens asked, “Do you just look at people and assess how gay or straight they are?”

                “Well, sometimes…”

                “That’s _so_ problematic.”

                “I’ve only been wrong a handful of times, though, so it can’t possibly be _that_ problematic.”

                “So when we first met,” Klemens said, “did you think that I was gay?”

                Sasha smiled a bit at the memory of the first time he met Klemens. “When we first met,” he answered, “my main concern was, ‘ _who is this strange, attractive man approaching me? Does he want to kill me?’_ but after a while I thought that you were trying to hit on me, and it was memorable because sometimes women try to flirt with me, but that’s it. A _lot_ of gay men hit on Leo, though, and he doesn’t like it one bit.”

                “Does Leo really look gay, though?” asked Klemens. “I mean, he’s not the one with the nipple piercing and the sunflower tattoo,” he added, poking fun at Sasha’s tattoo and especially at his piercing which he still felt deeply embarrassed about.

                Sasha knew that Klemens meant no harm by saying this, but still he couldn’t help but grow a little bit defensive. He blushed. “It’s not like I advertise either of those things or that you can even notice them just by looking at me fully clothed… and Leo did look pretty gay when he had longer hair, especially because he used to dress _much_ more flamboyantly.”

                “I just can’t see him as someone I’d ever want to hit on.”

                “Wow. Okay.”

                “Not in a mean way, of course,” Klemens quickly backtracked, even though he really did mean it in a mean way. “He’s just not my type. I would probably hit on Arthur, though.”

                “He’s not really my _type_ ,” Sasha mocked Klemens in a friendly manner. “But,” he continued, “he’s interesting and smart as hell and good-looking to boot so he’s what one may refer to as a veritable golden boy… Oh my _god_ , did I really just say that?”

                “But he can be so negative and closed off from other people. He doesn’t talk about his feelings unless something bad happens or unless he’s interested in someone.” Klemens looked around disdainfully as he grabbed hold of Sasha’s hand.

                ‘ _You don’t either, Klemens,’_ Sasha thought as he squeezed the other man’s warm hand. One of the things that he didn’t like about Klemens was that he seemed oblivious to the fact that he did almost everything he claimed to dislike in other people. “How did you two meet, anyway? It seems unusual that a lawyer and a physicist from completely different backgrounds would just meet like that.”

                “Is it any more likely than that a lawyer and a barista from completely different backgrounds would just happen to meet, and, you know…” Klemens leaned over and gave Sasha a quick kiss.

                Sasha blushed again because kissing in public was still new and strange to him, no matter whom it was with. “I suppose not,” he said.

                “In any case, though,” Klemens continued, “I really do think that Arthur’s so deep in the closet that he’s finding Christmas presents.”

                “I’ve never heard that expression in my life. _Christmas presents?_ Really, who the hell says that?” He paused. “And what do you think Arthur would say if he somehow heard this entire conversation we just had? You know him better than I do.”

                Klemens smiled. “Oh, I know what he would say,” he smirked again. “He would say, ‘Fuck off already, Klemens!’ and be done with it.” Sasha laughed at Klemens’s imitation of what Arthur might say.

                The conversation changed subjects and somehow came upon Klemens’s experience in law school. He told some long-winded story about something that seemed rather unconsciously frivolous and privileged to Sasha, though he couldn’t particularly make out what the point was. Nevertheless, Klemens continued to speak for some time, occasionally sharing a point of genuine interest.

                “And so,” he said when he was finally finished, “that’s how I ended up in Strasbourg.”

                Sasha hadn’t really been listening to anything he said, but nodded anyway. Truth be told; Klemens’s life, although it had always been lavish and comfortable, just seemed incredibly boring and never interested him at all. In fact, Klemens understood this, and even seemed to take pride in how utterly boring he made himself when he wanted to be, and how he made up for the lack of excitement about him with charm. Sasha didn’t know why he loved Klemens; he had no strong moral conviction about him, or any spontaneous conviction at all, really. He followed a stern set of principles with no leeway, never did anything that seemed particularly good or anything particularly bad. He rarely expressed a strong emotion, and despite the fact that he _was_ madly in love with Sasha, he had only directly expressed it a handful of times. He never spoke of anything that was personally important to him, and when he did, he gave objective facts instead of subjective truths. He wanted people to unequivocally like him or at least be willing to side with him on any given matter, but because of the lack of personality that he chose to express at any given moment, they usually did. He was driven not by compassion or his circumstances, but based on what might have been best for his needs at any given moment. He only had genuine conversations like his conversations with Sasha once he had mentally cleared his companion of having any motive to negatively judge him whatsoever.

                Sometimes, despite their glaring similarities, he seemed to Sasha to almost the opposite of Leo, who had so many experiences and odd convictions to share that he couldn’t keep track of all of them. And that wasn’t to say that Klemens had no personality whatsoever; he _did_ , and he had a strong one at that, but the difficulty of deciphering it all-too-often ran to the point of ambiguousness.

                “That’s interesting,” said Sasha. “I lived with my grandmother for my entire upbringing, apart from any other member of my nuclear family. They lived in Petersburg, too, but the only member of my family that I ever really saw was my father.”

                “Were you close to him?” Klemens asked, letting go of Sasha’s hand.

                Sasha smirked like someone who could use his disadvantage to his aid. “I wasn’t close to him. I was probably his least favorite, if anything, and I have nine siblings, so that’s saying a lot.” He paused. “He was a businessman and I learned a lot of the ropes of finance and running a firm from him, but that’s about the extent of our relationship. After my grandmother died, I don’t really talk to anyone in my family.”

                “And you’re fine with it?”

                “I don’t care, and they certainly don’t.”

                “I’m sorry.”

                “It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.”

                “If you say so.”

Sasha gently kissed him before saying, “Klemens,” he said, “I should go home soon.”

                Klemens took a moment to collect himself before answering, albeit a bit annoyedly, “Yes, yes, alright.” Although he was usually in the mood to do unspeakable things to Sasha, Sasha was almost never in the mood to partake in any of it, for whatever reason- a lack of time, a lack of privacy, that he wanted to be home by a certain hour, or just that being with Klemens emotionally exhausted him to no end. The last one more than the others- no matter how badly Sasha _wanted_ to be around Klemens, the entire ordeal drained him to the point that doing anything physical with him was out of the question altogether. Furthermore, because Sasha wasn’t a particularly physically affectionate person to begin with, it was seldom that they did anything that went beyond impassioned kissing.

                What did Klemens think about the whole matter? The truth was that he didn’t really think about it at all. Although he was perhaps more intelligent than Sasha, he possessed nowhere near the same emotional depth as him and seldom _wanted_ to understand other people. He wanted to be able to understand Sasha’s emotions, by virtue of the fact that he was in love with him, but this extended to nobody else. He loved Sasha with a fervor that he had never felt for anyone else and that he doubted that he would ever feel again.

                He didn’t understand him, and although it was partially because Sasha didn’t understand himself yet, he didn’t understand this, either. The way he saw his lover was complex, but for the sake of simplicity he had broken it down into three parts: Sasha was _young_ , he was _lovely_ , and most of all, he was _malleable_ , and terribly so. Whether he was malleable to his own ideas or to someone else’s he was malleable all the same, and this youthful elasticity entranced Klemens. Despite his own concrete tendencies, Klemens loved those who weren’t yet set in their ways.

                And then there was Leo, his tacit enemy. They were civil around each other for their mutual love of Sasha, but their interactions were too cold to suggest any genuine sort of warmth. Klemens acted so coldly to Leo because he saw him not as inferior, but as an equal. Yes, as equals matched in nearly everything; they were both young professionals; they were matched for looks; they were both immigrants; they were, as far as either of them were concerned, equally intelligent; they were both bisexual; they both contested for Sasha’s love. As strange as it seemed to him even after he had thought about it and reasoned with himself for a considerable amount of time, Klemens thought that if Leo wasn’t so thick-skinned, then he could have easily fallen in love with him, too.

                Klemens took love with a grain of salt, but fell in love madly and without caution. If he had wanted to, he could have written letters to Sasha as fiery as those written when letter-writing wasn’t a lost art. He could have written an epic, a thousand sonnets all proclaiming his passion with different techniques and nuances. Yet, he knew that Sasha didn’t want any of it. When Sasha had said months ago that all he wanted was to love him, he hadn’t been modest with stating his desires; Klemens now knew that it was legitimately all he wanted, and it all but drove him to the brink of insanity.

                “ _Why don’t you want anything from me, Sasha?”_ he wanted to ask on a regular basis. “ _Because there’s so much that I want from you but don’t want to ask after you’re so unimposing!”_

                And then, of course, there was the marriage thing. Klemens hated being married, and wished that he’s never gone through with it in the first place. Despite everything that he had said before to insist that he didn’t care about his marriage or his spouse, he found it impossible to stop caring about either of the two altogether, and this lack of control over his own emotions and thoughts disgusted him. He loved Maria Eleonore, he _did_ , but she was never _enough_ for him; she had never been enough for him, and she could never be enough.

                He should have been ashamed of everything he was doing, and this much, he knew, was certain. However, he felt no shame for himself. He should have felt ashamed of the fact that he was an infidel, but he didn’t. He should have felt ashamed of the fact that he had practically been toying with a younger man who was far less experienced than he was, but he didn’t. He should have felt ashamed of _so many things_ , but he didn’t. Klemens von Metternich didn’t see any reason for himself to follow the rules that he imposed on other people.

\---

                Arthur had spent a month of the summer in his hometown of Dublin with the vacation days that he had spent a couple of years building up. He had then taken another five days to see Giuseppina in Montreal, and the came back to Quebec City. He came back with a thicker Irish accent than he had had before, and had to get re-acclimated to his old new lifestyle. The first person he saw when he came back to the city wasn’t one of friends, or any of his three next-door neighbors, but instead his old friend Klemens whom he had recently learned some surprising news about. They met in Arthur’s abstemious apartment one evening over a cup of coffee in late July.

                Klemens was happy to see his friend after this long sojourn, but even in such little time so much about him had changed; actually, he didn’t know whether visiting his old home had changed him or whether it had changed him _back_. He seemed more laid-back and relaxed than he had before, but considering how uptight Arthur had been before, perhaps this was a good thing.

                “How was Dublin?” he asked in English. Because Arthur felt more comfortable speaking in English than in French and because Klemens needed to maintain his English-speaking skills, the two of them always did it this way. “How is Giuseppina doing?” He regularly spoke to Giuseppina, but confirmation of her health from someone who had seen her physically would have been nice.

                “She’s alright,” replied Arthur, making sure to articulate through his accent. “Struggling with the expenses of the city.” He changed the subject, because he missed her too much to talk about without depressing himself. “She told me some interesting information,” she said.

                “Are you going to share it with me?” Klemens knew that he had to maintain his English-speaking skills for his career, but he didn’t like that he had to _think_ before he spoke.

                Arthur lowered his voice. “She told me that she thinks you’re having an affair with our dearest friend, Sasha.”

                Klemens, to his surprise, didn’t really seem to react. “Oh,” he said, staring into his coffee cup. “She wasn’t lying.”

                “I _know_ she wasn’t lying, and that’s why I mentioned it.”

                “Do you want me to elaborate?”

                Arthur sighed. He, being one of Klemens’s close friends, _knew_ that he was married but didn’t think it his place to judge his actions or lifestyle. “I’d appreciate it if you told me what the hell is going on.”

                “There’s not much to say. The information that you have is all that’s worth mentioning.”

                If there was one thing to be said about Arthur, it was that he didn’t waste any breath on traipsing around what he wanted to say. He shook his head. “Klemens,” he said. “You have to stop. That’s fucked up.”

                Klemens quickly grew defensive. “Don’t worry. I know that it is, as you said, fucked up.”

                “Well, then, stop doing it.”

                “Why should I?”

                If there was one thing to be said about Klemens, it was that it was impossible to reason with him once he had made up his mind about something, and now was evidently one of those times. “Well, if you cared about Sasha at all, you would stop giving him dick to satisfy your own convoluted desires.” He spoke his mind at the expense of sounding rude, but he couldn’t have cared less. He _liked_ Klemens and considered him one of his closest friends, but when Klemens was essentially being a cunt to everyone around him, he deserved to know it.

                “This doesn’t even affect you at _all_ ,” Klemens tried to argue. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had lost an argument, and now didn’t feel like a good time to start. “I won’t accept an intervention that I never asked for. Your telling me what to do and how I should live my life is just… well, it’s egregious.”

                “You use that word so often that I’m not sure you even know what it means anymore.” Arthur continued, “And if you’re going to keep on disregarding the feelings and relationships of everyone around you, if anything, I feel _entitled_ to tell you how to live your life. Because, you know, being in the general proximity of the whole affair, it _does_ affect me. Perhaps not _directly_ , but it certainly does and you’re being very arrogant to deny that.”

                Klemens slowly caressed Arthur’s face with his right hand, and whispered, “Arthur, are you jealous?”

                In order for this part to make sense, we must take a step back and examine the history of Arthur’s and Klemens’s friendship. Although the origins of their friendship are unclear, it’s evident that they became close friends last June, about a month after Klemens had moved here, and for a long time, Arthur remined Klemens’s only genuine friend. This was before nearly every development in this story took place; this was long before Klemens saw Sasha working at _La Republique_ ; this was months before Leo found out that Josephine had been cheating on him with Hippolyte Charles for _months_ ; this was long before Sasha even knew that Leo was from _France_ and not _Italy_ ; this was about a month before Arthur started seeing Giuseppina. This was when the only preexisting element of the circumstances surrounding the current situation was that Arthur and Klemens were good friends.

                The real development is that although Arthur would likely have described himself as 99.8% heterosexual at the time, that didn’t stop him from developing a rampant infatuation with Klemens in the month that they had been friends. After a few days of thinking about it, he decided that it was better to get rejected than to just not put his best foot forth at all, so naturally, he decided to ask Klemens out.

                Their conversation went something like this:

                Arthur asked Klemens, “Will you go on a date with me?”

                “I’m married. And in any case, I only see you as a friend.”

                “Okay.”

                And that was it. Arthur quickly got over his fleeting crush and the bitter sting of rejection and moved on with his life, and the two never spoke about it again until Klemens alluded to it now.

                Arthur scowled and drew away from Klemens’s gentle touch. He shook his head. “Of _course_ I’m not jealous! _”_ he exclaimed, and it was the truth; he really didn’t care anymore, but was slightly offended by the fact that Klemens had the gall to bring it up. He hated the fact that him being jealous wasn’t a far-fetched assumption to make. He wanted to hate Klemens so badly, but he just _couldn’t_. He paused. “I’m _not_ jealous because I don’t like you like that, and even if I _was,_ that wouldn’t change the fact of the matter that your behavior is inconsiderate of everyone around you.”

                Klemens wasn’t fully convinced that Arthur wasn’t even a _tiny_ bit jealous, but it wasn’t worth pursuing this train of thought anymore. He was fighting a losing battle, and the fact that he had no fodder to defend himself didn’t help. He knew, after all, that there were no circumstances in which he was justified to do what he had been doing. It wasn’t worth fighting a losing battle when the friendship of one of his dearest friends was at stake.

                Crossing his arms and closing his eyes, he finally did what he hadn’t done in a long, long time. “Fine,” he said, defeated, “you’re right, and on all accounts, I’m wrong.”

\---

                When Klemens left Arthur’s apartment an hour or two later, he decided to knock on the B(u)onaparte-Romanov household’s door just to say hi before he went on his way. To his surprise, however, it was Caroline who opened the door.

                Klemens had kind of forgotten that Caroline existed over the course of the past few weeks, but he was happy to see her when he again remembered that she existed. He had nothing specific to say about her other than that she seemed like a nice girl and that Sasha liked her a good deal.

                “Clément!” she said excitedly when she opened the door. Despite her happiness at seeing him, however, she didn’t invite him in and she didn’t fully open the door. Unbeknownst to him or anyone else, she had been eavesdropping on his entire conversation with Arthur by listening intently with an ear pressed to her bedroom wall, and had picked up on some information that she was _definitely_ not supposed to know.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “Why are you here? Neither _Napoleone_ nor Sasha mentioned that you would be coming over.”

                Shaking his head, Klemens replied, “I wasn’t planning on it, but I was visiting Arthur and thought that I would stop by for a few seconds to say hello. Are either of them home right now?”

                Caroline glanced away from him and said, “They’re both home right now, but I think,” she began to mumble, “they’re a bit occupied right now. But I can tell Sasha that you came by to say hi.”

                Because she was more than a little bit infatuated with Klemens at this point, she mentally slapped herself for being so _boring_ and personality-less in all of her interactions with him. Caroline wasn’t stupid; she knew _very well_ that her infatuation with Klemens would never amount to anything other than a painful infatuation for a number of reasons; he was ten years older than her; her main relation to him was that he was one of her brother’s acquaintances; at this rate, she would never have a _real_ opportunity to talk with him; he was married, but even more important was the fact that he was _clearly_ madly in love with Sasha. But it had persisted and grown as meaningless infatuations do, and kept her ear particularly tuned in to any mentions of Klemens around the house. Fortunately for her, he was mentioned _very_ often.

                “Oh! Well, I’d greatly appreciate it if you told Sasha that I came _just_ to say hi to him.”

                “I can do that.”

                Klemens nodded, not as satisfied as he wanted to be but satisfied nonetheless. “Thanks, Caroline. I’ll be on my way, then.”

                “Bye, Clément.”

                Caroline closed the door quietly so that nobody in the house could hear before going back to her room and shutting the door. It was, she thought, the first time that Klemens had addressed her by name, and she felt elated despite the seeming insignificance. Klemens, she knew, was an attorney, and part of his job was to make people like and trust him, but she liked and trusted him even though she knew that his demeanor towards her was likely an amiable façade more than anything else. Despite everything that she had overheard today, she still liked him. He was the head of yet another imminent betrayal of her own brother, her flesh and blood, and yet she couldn’t help but like him.

                She paced the floor of her bedroom perhaps one hundred times, thinking about the way that he had said her name- _Caroline_ , pronouncing the three syllables smoothly and without a trace of the foreign German tongue. He had pronounced it the _French_ way, the exact way that she wanted it to sound. And yet, she was also certain that if she had continued to go by _Annunziata_ , the name by which she was christened, he would have pronounced _that_ correctly, too. This was the thing that she subconsciously liked most about Klemens: even through the little she had seen of him, it was evident that he was _correct_. That he always did everything the _proper_ way, the way that things ought to be done. How _right_ he always was, and how _wrong_ everyone else seemed in comparison!

                Yet, in everything that Klemens maneuvered so perfectly, there lay a glaring hint of imperfection that made him seem not _divine_ , perhaps, but just as wonderful. Among the handsome features of his face was his crooked nose, which threw off the balance of his well-chiseled features but served as a reminder that even _he_ had his faults. Among the positive aspects of his character lay the flaw that he looked down his nose at all others. And the fact that he was in love was marred by the fact that he loved at the expense of everyone in his general vicinity.

\--- ON ANOTHER NOTE---

                Leo had always had trouble sleeping. As an adolescent in boarding school, he often fell asleep hours after his roommates, lulled to sleep by the sounds of their breathing. This insomnia wasn’t something that he brought about upon himself or would even wish upon his worst enemies, but rarely anything helped with it. Even when he did fall asleep when he wanted to, he woke up hours before the rest of the world and slowly watched it arise while he was fully awake.

                When he was with Josephine, she would often read to him as a nightly ritual which sometimes helped him, but often not. Sasha read to him sometimes, but because Leo had had so much more exposure to French in his lifetime than Sasha did, he often found that Sasha had difficulties picking up on the subtleties of the language when he read aloud. He had never actually _told_ Sasha that he was an insomniac, but he was certain that he had figured it out one way or another.

                Still, he liked falling asleep in Sasha’s arms every night, to the sound of his sweet, gentle breathing.

                “Do you know how much I love you?” he asked Sasha the next day. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

                Sasha blushed; Leo told him quite often how much he loved him, but every time it was different; once the wall that Leo had built around himself had been penetrated, Sasha found that he was unexpectedly quite romantic. “Perhaps once or twice,” he answered.

                Leo kissed Sasha’s hand once, then twice, then three times. “I love you,” he said, “more than I could ever love anyone again. I could kiss you a million times in a passionate fervor and not yet be satisfied.” He paused. “Every day I think to myself how happy I am that you fell in love with me when we only barely knew each other and how horribly lost I would be without you.”

                Smiling softly, Sasha felt inclined to say something romantic back to him. In a hushed voice, he said, “I fell in love with you the moment I made tea for you because your hands were cold. I never in a million years thought that you would ever love me back. Before that day, I think…” he thought back to when he was a teenager and had a crush on Nikolai Rostov from _War and Peace_. “You’re the first person I’ve ever loved as much as I do.”

                “I love you so much.” _I love you more than I ever thought I would_.

                “I love you too.” _Still kind of feeling it for Nikolai Rostov, but whatever_.

\---

                Sasha met Maria at a tea lounge later that day, as they hadn’t seen each other in a long time; similar to Arthur’s month-long voyage back to Dublin to reconnect with his roots, Maria had spent the majority of the summer in Poland and Russia with her family and friends, and had only returned recently.

                “Sasha!” she exclaimed in Russian when she saw him, throwing her arms around his torso for a tight embrace. “I’ve missed you.”

                Hugging her back, Sasha warmly replied, “I’ve missed you!” as well. They went into the tea lounge together and informally sat down at one of the tables. He was most eager to hear firsthand about his hometown, Saint Petersburg, to which he hadn’t returned in years. “How was Petersburg?” he asked out of genuine interest.

                “What is there to say about Petersburg? It’s still cold, it’s still beautiful,” she said. “I spent only a week there and spent all of my time with family and friends, so I didn’t see the city very much.”

                “Ah, well, Petersburg will always be Petersburg.”

                “Except when it was Petrograd and then Leningrad.”

                “Hey, shut up, you know what I meant.”

                “How’s your husband doing?” He had never actually _met_ Maria’s husband, because although he was sure that he was a great guy and everything, he would probably not be thrilled about the fact that his wife was hanging out with a somewhat-attractive guy also her age.

                “He’s doing well. He’s still visiting relatives in Russia, but he’s due to be back in a couple of weeks. He doesn’t speak a word of Polish, so introducing him to the rest of my family was a bit of a catastrophe, but I think that they came to like him in time.”

                Two and two clicked in Sasha’s mind. ‘ _Wait, did Maria…’_ he thought, ‘ _Oh my god, Maria eloped. This explains so much. But why?’_

                “How is Leo doing?” she asked.

                Sasha had to think about it for a second. “I don’t really know. I think he’s good. I think that he’s been more relaxed lately, which is unusual and almost concerning, but it is what is.”

                Maria paused, then smiled. “What have you been up to?” she asked.

                “Same old, same old. Leo’s sister lives with us now, you should come meet her. She’s only a year or so younger than you.” Now that he thought about it, it was weird to think that Maria, whom he considered to be his peer, was only about a year and a half older than someone whom he thought of as his sister more than anything. “Other than that… I kind of want to quit my job.”

                “What do you even do? I should know this, but I don’t.” Somehow, Sasha’s occupation had never come up in any of their conversations.

                “I’m a barista at a place called _La Republique_. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.”

                “Oh, yeah,” Maria nodded. “I’ve passed by it a few times on my way and have vaguely considered going in.”

                “Don’t.” Sasha considered quitting his job every few months, but so far has not had the nerve to actually do it. “Anyway, when do you start classes? Aren’t you taking some classes at the university here or something?”

                “Yeah, I’m just going to take classes here and then transfer credits over to Saint Petersburg because self-studying and then flying over for exams is just _not_ worth it. My first class on cognitive linguistics is on August twenty-seventh, so I’ve got a lot of time to do whatever before then. You know, why don’t _you_ go to college since you already live here and have the time?”

                Maria had a point; it was all-too-often that Sasha said that he _wished_ that he’d gone to college instead of moving halfway across the world, when the obvious solution was to just get a degree from the university in the city in which he already lived, anyway.

                “You’re right,” he said. “I should.” Now that he came to think of it, it had been a _long_ time since he had actually accomplished anything of note, and it was time again to put his best foot forward.

                And so, with the help of Maria Naryshkina, Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov decided to stop speculating and to make something of himself again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think about Klemens? (either in the story or irl; he was an interesting guy)


	14. Rich Text

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha glanced at him briefly. “The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch is a story that nobody would care to read, trust me.”
> 
> “Yes," replied Leo, "because you haven’t hit a deep depression yet, and that’s the best part of the book.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the best parts of stories are the parts when the title gets incorporated into the actual plot

                It was only at the end of July that Leo realized that he was rapidly approaching the event that he had been dreading for the entire past year: his thirtieth birthday. When he realized this, instead of feeling so isolated and melancholy as he had at the beginning of the year about the fact that his perceived youth was about to be _over_ , he didn’t care that much; before he had been angry at the fact that he was twenty-nine and didn’t have a single aspect of his life together, but he now felt that everything would be pretty okay going forward. He had a legitimate career, a connection with his family, a nice apartment, a nice paycheck, and a partner with whom he was deeply, utterly in love.

                He kept on trying to find holes in his life, things he was unsatisfied with, but he found nothing. It was still impossible for him to believe that for the first time in a long time, he was happy.

                It was the twenty-ninth of June, and his birthday was on the fifteenth of August. This summer had seemed short, and when he dwelled upon it, he didn’t even know where all of it had gone. He had worked, and he had spent time with Sasha and Caroline and other friends whom he had met somewhere, but other than that, nothing in particular seemed to stand out to him. He and Sasha had briefly discussed going to Montreal for a few days, but either they never made real plans to begin with, or they fell through. Well, he figured, it wasn’t even August yet, and summer didn’t officially end until the twenty-first of September, so he would talk it out with Sasha sometime later.

                Now, though, he was getting coffee with Jean-Jacques Cambacérès at _La Republique_ , his favorite local coffee joint, decidedly so because he didn’t actually have to pay for the coffee. Personality-wise and appearance-wise, the two were as different as could be; Cambacérès was tall, plump, flamboyant, and outgoing; Leo was short, angular, and personable but reserved all the same. Despite their stark differences, however, the two had become close over time. And, for the most part, Leo enjoyed Cambacérès’s company. Their friendship was a simple and uncomplicated one.

                “Yesterday evening,” said Leo to his companion, “I was trying to fall asleep when I heard a loud clatter come from the apartment next door, and so I thought it must have been _bad_ because it was so loud, and I’m pretty sure that he’s dead now.”

                Cambacérès was never quite sure whether the vitriol that Leo seemed to carry for Arthur was playful or genuine, but it seemed to be a mix of both.

                “He’s not dead; I saw him just this morning.”

                “That’s certainly a shame.” Leo had no way of knowing, of course, that Arthur was actually sort of his ally at this point.

\---

                Given the fact that Sasha actually seemed to enjoy his work, it came as a shock to Leo when he said that he wanted to quit his job. It happened on the first of August when Sasha took him out on a walk by the river in the evening, and said, “Leo, we need to discuss something important.”

                These words sent a shiver of shock down Leo’s spine, as he had heard them before all too many times and the outcome had _never_ been good. Nevertheless, he remained nonchalant on the outside.

                “What do you want to talk about?” he asked. ‘ _Please don’t tell me that you’re leaving me, please don’t tell me that you’re leaving me, pleasedon’ttellmethatyou’releavingme.’_

                “Well, I decided…” Sasha paused. “I decided that I want to get a degree.”

                “That’s it?”

                “And I want to quit my job.”

                Leo thought about it for a second. “Well, you can’t do both at the same time.”

                “And I want to start a business.”

                “You can’t do all three of those things at the same time. And starting a business is _expensive_ , Sasha, what do you even want to deal in? Given that you were to open a business, do you even know enough about finance to do that?”

                “Well, I don’t really like having to wake up at unreasonable hours every morning just to work what most people wouldn’t even consider to be a _real_ job, and I think that I would like to study either literature or journalism, and I think that I would also like to open a tea room.”

                Leo reached down and took ahold of Sasha’s hand, intertwining their fingers together. “I hate to tell you this,” he said, as gently as he could, “but there’s no practical value in a literature degree whatsoever. Don’t get a degree in literature.”

                “That’s what I was thinking, but… I could study theology…”

                To Sasha’s surprise, Leo laughed at this sentiment. “Sasha, you go to church _maybe_ once a year.”

                “Well,” huffed Sasha, “it’s not _my_ fault that there are no Orthodox churches around here! And anyway, it’s not like _you_ go to church any more often than _I_ do.”

                “Well, I don’t have the temerity to call myself a man of god. I’m merely a god of men.”

                Sasha gripped Leo’s hand harder and said, “You think you’re being clever, don’t you?” By this point he had made it up in his mind that his boyfriend was _definitely_ more narcissistic than the average man was, but saw it as a non-issue all the same.

                “The cleverest of them all,” Leo affirmed. “In any case, do what you want, just be profitable.” He wasn’t sure what Sasha’s underlying insecurity with being suggested what to do was, but it was _definitely_ there and he didn’t want to do anything to escalate it any further. Similarly, Sasha could have told Leo right now that he was kind of being a condescending fuck, but he didn’t bring it up because it wasn’t important enough to him to engage in any sort of discourse about it.

                He decided that it was finally time to tell Leo about a major underlying circumstance of his life, but that wouldn’t affect him for a long time to come. “That’s the _thing,_ Leo,” he said, unsure how to phrase his statement so that _he_ wouldn’t sound like the condescending fuck. “I don’t really _need_ to be profitable.”

                Leo knew at this point, of course, that Sasha came from a very wealthy background (Leo’s perception of wealth was somewhat skewed, but even given that the original statement still stood), but both of their socioeconomic statuses were so awkwardly different that they had never formally talked about it. “What do you mean?” he asked.

                Sasha shook his head and looked away. “I don’t even know how to say this.”

                “Just say it.”

                He took a deep breath. “Well, you know how I was raised by my grandmother Catherine because reasons, right?”

                Leo nodded.

                “Well, she was considerably wealthy, and when she died a few years ago, she essentially left me all of her assets.”

                “Wait, what?”

                “Yeah. I basically make more on interest than I do by working in a year, but I can’t actually access any of it until I’m twenty-five.”

                Leo reacted to this news surprisingly nonchalantly; these new facts changed absolutely nothing for him. “Okay,” he nodded. “Then I suppose that you don’t have to worry about being profitable.”

                “Not really.”

                “Then just study literature and quit your job.”

                “So, we’re back to step one again, eh?” Sasha smiled. Then, looking behind him to make sure that no one was around, he stopped walking for a second and gently kissed Leo.

\---

                Caroline’s relationship with her brother was unconventional, in a word, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it. Given their family’s history, it made _sense_ why he acted the way he did around her, but just because she understood it didn’t mean that she had to like it. Their father had died when she was three years old and _Napoleone_ was just sixteen, and from that moment it was if he strode to be the alpha male of the Buonaparte family. This passionate near-obsession subsided when Leo was about twenty and was almost forgotten when me moved abroad, but still Caroline could see traces of this aspect of him in the way he behaved with her.

                Of course, because of their age difference and the fact that they hadn’t even grown up together,  it was impossible for either of them to have a truly _normal_ sibling relationship, but it didn’t stop Caroline from wanting however close their relationship could get to it. Leo acted like her parent more than anything, which actually made sense because he tried to act that way to Josephine’s daughter who was exactly her age, but that was different; Caroline just wanted her brother to act like he was her _brother_ , but she just didn’t know how to tell him.

                “ _Napoleone_ , can I get a job?” asked Caroline.

                Leo glanced up at her and thought about it for a minute. “Well, as long as you’re here, sure. You didn’t really have to ask me first.”

                The idea of Leo being okay with something without it having been run by him beforehand was new and slightly shocking to Caroline. She loved her brother, but the fact of the matter was that he was a complete control freak. ‘ _I didn’t think that that would go over so smoothly,’_ she thought.

                “Well,” she said, “now I have to look for a job.”

                Sasha added into the conversation, “ _La Republique_ is hiring.”

                “The place where _you_ work?” asked Caroline, to which Sasha nodded. “Wouldn’t that be weird, though?”

                “I’m not catching your drift.”

                “I mean, we live together, and my brother who is dating you also worked there, so if I applied to work there and _happened_ to get accepted, it would like a blatant act of favoritism on the part of the employer.”

                “Does it really _matter?_ It’s not like you’re the one who would be looked upon unfavorably. _”_

                “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. And it’s not like anyone would have to _know_ that we live together or that I’m _Napoleone’s_ sister. We have different last names, after all.”

                Leo interjected, “Caroline, Bonaparte is a really uncommon last name, the only difference in our names is that you’ve retained the U in it, and we look enough alike that it’s pretty obvious that we’re related.” He paused. “I’m not saying that you _shouldn’t_ apply for the job, but logistically? Come on.”

                Sasha and Caroline exchanged a knowing ‘ _typical Leo’_ glance, but he either didn’t notice or pretended not to.

\---

                Caroline got accepted to the job a week later, and began work almost immediately. She didn’t work the ridiculously early morning shift like Sasha did, fortunately for her, but sacrificed most of her afternoons working part-time. Because she usually worked while the rest of society was _also_ working, business was slow, and it was highly reminiscent of the time that she spent working in a video store in Paris.

                It was one afternoon of her first week there when a man walked in and made suspicious eye contact with her for an uncomfortably long period of time before he said anything.

                “Sorry if this is awkward, but are you Leo’s relative?” he asked. He glanced down at her nametag and saw that their last names were different by one letter, so even if she wasn’t then this would have been a marvelous coincidence.

                Caroline shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she lied, “but I have no idea who this ‘Leo’ is.”

                The man, too, shook his head. “I’m sorry, you just look like someone who I used to live with, and you have the same last name, too, so I thought that you _must_ be related. I’m Antoine, by the way.”

                “Caroline,” she introduced herself, and the two went on with their days.

                When she came home that day, she asked Leo, “Do you have a friend named Antoine that you used to live with?”

                Leo nodded, albeit slowly. “Yeah, why?” he asked. Antoine was the friend that, more often than not, he forgot that he even had.

                “I saw him today at work, and he asked if I was related to you.”

                “And?”

                “I told him that I’ve never heard of you in my life.”

                Leo blinked at her and didn’t know what to say. She had only told him because it seemed to be right up his alley of humor, but evidently, he didn’t think it was very funny. “Can you say that again?” he asked.

                “I told him that I’ve never heard of someone called ‘Leo Bonaparte’ in my life.”

                He nodded again, and began to smile deviously. “If you see him again, keep telling him that we’re not related. We’ll play the long con.”

                It was on that same night that Leo received a text from Antoine which said, ‘ _Leo I met a girl working at La Republique who looks just like you and has the same last name as you is she your sister?’_

                Leo texted back immediately, ‘ _That’s a strange coincidence but I have no idea who you’re talking about.’_ He smiled menacingly; despite level of self-control which he tried (and usually succeeded) to display to others, there were certain mortal pleasures which he found himself incapable of denying himself; perhaps it was in part due to his compulsive propensity to lie, but he could never resist playing the long con.

\---

                Days later, Klemens was still thinking about what Arthur had said to him about the nature of his relationship with Sasha.

                ‘ _Is he right?’_ he wondered. He _hated_ when other people were right. It was egregious! He said to himself about twenty times a day, how _right_ he was and how _wrong_ everyone else was!

                ‘ _Is Arthur right?’_ he couldn’t stop asking himself. ‘ _Is it true? Am I being a shitty person? Am I being insensitive to everyone else?’_

                But most of all, he wondered day in and day out, ‘ _Am I disrespecting Sasha?’_

\---

                It was only five days after Leo’s thirtieth birthday that Sasha convinced him that it would be beneficial for them to take a vacation, and so they went to Montreal for five days.

                “Really, Sasha,” Leo tried to tell him, “we really don’t need to go anywhere. I have to work, and…”

                But Sasha managed to sway him soon enough, and on the morning of August twentieth, the two were already in a train heading to Montreal. The train ride was _dull_ to say the least, and Sasha found it even more so because Leo was asleep on his shoulder the entire time. The only thing he had brought with him for entertainment was his old copy of _War and Peace_ from when he was still in school, and despite his love for it, he found it difficult to pay close attention; he found the _peace_ parts interesting, but he could have cared less for the _war_ parts.

                ‘ _If I was a character in this book,’_ he thought to himself, glancing up from whatever page he was on, ‘ _I think I would be… Natasha. No, that would be weird because I had a crush on her brother when I was younger… god.’_

                So he actually spent most of the train ride thinking about which character from _War and Peace_ he most related to, and how everyone else in his life fit around it. No matter how he thought about it, however, everything was all _wrong_.

                When Leo finally woke himself up as the train came close to arriving in Montreal, Sasha asked him the same question. “If you were a character in _War and Peace,”_ he said, “which character do you think you would be?”

                Leo didn’t hesitate before answering, “Prince Andrei, obviously. Why? Who would you be?”

                Sasha smiled, somewhat amused by Leo’s response. “I was thinking Natasha, but I’m not sure.”

                “That’s kind of sweet. Which character would you be in _Werther?_ ”

                “Charlotte,” he answered without even having to think about it.

                “Why do you always see yourself as the female heroine?”

                “Because, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Leo, but I’m a hot commodity these days.”

                Leo smiled. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I think you’re more like Werther.”

                Sasha glanced at him briefly. “ _The Sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch_ is a story that nobody would care to read, trust me.”

                “Yes, because you haven’t hit a deep depression yet, and that’s the best part of the book.”

                “The fact that you think I’m going to hit a deep depression in my near future is really reassuring.” He pinched Leo’s cheek, an action which he knew annoyed him to no end.

                In response, Leo merely reached out and knocked on the nearest wooden object he could see.

\---

                They spent the first day in Montreal at the museum of fine art, as art was one of the primary shared interests of both Leo and Sasha. Something that Leo didn’t know before this excursion, however, was that Sasha didn’t carry strong opinions when it came to art; his opinions were _impenetrable_ , and in Leo’s opinion, mostly bad. He critiqued art far more than he would ever be caught dead praising it. When considered with everything else Sasha did, it seemed more strongly to Leo than ever that Sasha wanted to seem like an intellectual _so badly_ , but he would _never_ be one in reality. Perhaps it wasn’t his fault because he didn’t realize it, but he was just too closed-minded to make anything great of himself. He didn’t like listening to advice from others, considering it condescending, and had never really done anything to improve himself up until these last few weeks; in the time that Leo had known him, he only ever did anything out of necessity or out of sheer impulse and without any premeditation whatsoever. Leo almost hoped that something completely outside of Sasha’s control would happen to him that would force him to realize how mediocre he was.

                Admittedly, Leo didn’t carry the habit of critically examining himself very often, but he knew that what he had just thought about his own beloved was, in two words, _extremely mean_. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time that he had passed such a harsh judgment on anyone whom he _liked_ or _thought of favorably_. He had said and meant terrible things about Josephine, of course, but that was only after the fact. And now, the fact was that Sasha would never be ambitious unless someone forced him to be.

                It took exactly thirty seconds for Leo to store away what he was thinking about to examine more critically at a different time; after all, if he _was_ to be spending an overwhelming part of the next five days with Sasha, then he supposed that it was better to not think _extremely mean_ things about him, for fear of his own exasperation.

                He decided in that moment that love was really nothing but a long con that the brain played on itself, but like all long cons, it was one that he couldn’t and wouldn’t deny himself. In a groundbreaking realization, Leo discovered that love overcame even his staunch aversion to mediocrity, and for that he began to question the extent of its influence over him.

\---

                It was that night, their first night in Montreal, that Sasha received an unexpected phone call. It came at what was probably one of the worst times; they were staying in Giuseppina and Georgina’s spare room for that night, and were preparing to have sex when Sasha’s cell phone started to vibrate. He would never forget where he was or what the circumstances where when he received this very phone call, and despite the various pleasantries that he had experienced during the day- looking at art, taking the train, exploring Montreal, and spending the day with the man whom he loved more than anyone else- they all came back to haunt him in time.

                Leo had just finished telling him about all of his sojourns that he had never mentioned before, such as his various trips through Italy, Germany, Austria, and even Egypt. While he had recounted all of his travels, Sasha listened with eager intent, wishing that he had spent more time traveling before deciding to settle down in one place which he didn’t even really consider to be home. It made Sasha envious, really- he was envious of the fact that Leo had done so much in his life that he never had the opportunity to mention all of it, and in that moment

                Sasha stopped kissing Leo for a second to say, “Hang on, my cell phone is ringing.”

                “Do you really have to answer it _now?”_ asked Leo. Another one of Sasha’s vices that he didn’t like was that he seemed to think that phone calls were the most important affairs in the world, and always dropped whatever he was doing to answer whenever someone called him.

Glancing at the screen, Sasha frowned. ‘ _Speak of the devil…’_ “I can’t wait to answer this,” he said. “It’s my brother, Kostya, so whatever he wants, it’s probably urgent.” Because of the animosity between them, the fact that Kostya was calling him in what would have been the middle of the night in Saint Petersburg disturbed him. Whatever he wanted, it was urgent, and Sasha didn’t expect anything but the worst.

                He answered the call. “ _Hello?”_ he said in Russian, not knowing what to expect. “ _Kostya? Is everything alright?”_

                There was a long pause in which Sasha said nothing, but just listened to whatever it was that his brother was telling him. “ _Yes, okay,”_ he said. “ _Okay, okay. My god, tell everyone I’ll be there in two days. Maybe faster.”_ He hung up the phone.

                “Is everything alright?” Leo asked.

                Sasha shook his head, but none of his thoughts could be seen on his face. “A car accident. My father already… passed away…” he answered, “and my sister is in critical condition. She’s probably not going to make it.” He didn’t look up from the ground at all as he said this. Just as he thought that everything in his life was going _so well_ , it all had to fall apart in front of him because of people whom he could barely bring himself to care about a week ago. He sighed. “I’m booking the next flight to Petersburg.”

                Leo drew Sasha into a gentle embrace and whispered into his ear, “Oh my god, Sasha, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?” At this point, both of them had completely forgotten about their conversation about Werther earlier today.

                “Please call into work for me and tell them that I’ll be in Russia for the next two weeks and that it’s an emergency.” Leo had never seen Sasha in a state remotely similar to this, and even Sasha didn’t know if he ever had been before. He didn’t know what to think or how to react to any of it. These people were his _family_ in technicality, but in practicality, almost all of them bore the same relations to him as complete strangers did. Sasha’s only connection to his family was really the formality of the family as an institution, and likewise, he understood that the only reason for him to even know about his father’s death was because of formality.

                _If_ this was all formality, however, then why did he now feel such deep shame and remorse over circumstances that he could not control? He saw no purpose to any of his shame or guilt other than he thought that it was his duty to suffer in the present circumstances, and so he caused himself to suffer. He went through the pain and trouble of caring not because he really did, but because he felt as if he had to. Out of all of them, after all, Kostya was the only one who had grown up with him as a brother, and Kostya was the only one with whom he felt he had any real sort of familial connection.

“My god,” he grimaced, “I have a flight to catch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been publishing updates a lot more frequently lately because I'm going to France over the summer in a program where I can't use any English and I want to finish before I leave instead of taking a two-month hiatus.
> 
> Discussion question: what do you honestly think about this work so far?
> 
> (this isn't rly a discussion question I just rly want feedback)


	15. Absence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One week of Sasha’s absence stretched into two, and two stretched into three.

                One week of Sasha’s absence stretched into two, and two stretched into three. In all of that time he had received a single phone call from Sasha, and that was to tell him that his sister had just died and that he would have to stay in St. Petersburg for another week at the least. There was no more information, no words of emotion, no nothing. When he tried to speak French after the long period without it, some Russian words got caught in the way, but he didn’t notice.

                Leo didn’t know what he was doing or how he was feeling, but the one thing he _did_ know was that he himself was unhappy, and even though he knew that none of Sasha’s sufferings were his fault directly, he still felt it his fault that everything happened when it did. As he had spent the last few weeks in relative solitude to what he had experienced before, he remembered the conversation that they had had the day before when he’d compared Sasha to Werther in part one of _The Sufferings of Young Werther_. And perhaps for the first time, he felt remorse over something that he had said or done.

                As condescending as he was and could be, Leo didn’t consider himself a moral paragon. He lied both to others and to himself; he took advantage of people, including Sasha; he hated without remorse. He didn’t see anything bad about any of the objectively immoral things that he did, because his moral code always included exceptions when it came to himself. However, this time he saw himself as directly responsible for something that had had a profound impact on both himself and his loved one, and he wished that he had never criticized Sasha to begin with.

                ‘ _I miss him,’_ he thought to himself innumerable times every day. ‘ _I miss him so much. I want him here with me. I want to see him. I want to touch him. I want to hold him. I want him to talk to me about Russian literature and how excited he is to go to university and how he wants to open a tea store one day. I’d even take him talking about how much he loves Klemens von Metternich. I would be elated even if he texted five words to me about anything in the world. I’d take anything.’_

                As he soon came to realize in that long draught of Sasha’s absence, he didn’t have many friends. Although this didn’t particularly bother him, the constant silence in the apartment began to draw on his nerves, and he decided that the best thing to do at this point would be to distract himself from his perennial lovesickness by working more. Because of this, he soon started spending an overwhelming part of his day at the lab, trying to spend as little time at home as possible. Caroline seemed to be doing the same thing, and it soon came about that the only time either of them would spend real time together was during breakfast and dinner; now, because Caroline barely knew how to cook and because Leo had gotten out of the habit of cooking for himself, preparing anything worth eating took more effort than he remembered.

                Oftentimes, Caroline remarked to him, “I’m surprised that you even _know_ how to cook, _Napoleone.”_ , to which Leo would always reply something along the lines of, “It was an act of self-preservation; Josephine knew how to burn water.”

                Caroline always wondered how exactly it was possible to burn water, but knowing Josephine, she didn’t doubt it for a second.

\---

                While Sasha was gone, Klemens acted on a whim, took another trip to Austria for a few days, and asked Caroline to water his plants and feed his cat for him. When she asked him why he didn’t ask Arthur to do it, he merely replied that she needed the money more than he did. She felt kind of insulted by this, but didn’t bother to read into it because Klemens _probably_ wasn’t trying to insult her.

Although she knew that it would _never_ happen, the small crush that Caroline had developed on Klemens when they first met in June had never subsided, and if anything, had grown larger. She knew that her only reasons for liking him were superficial at best, and that she should have been inclined to dislike him because her brother found him insufferable, but alas, the heart wanted what it wanted, and in this case it wanted none other than Klemens Wenzel von Metternich.

Although she knew that it was irresponsible, therefore, sometimes she spent longer in Klemens’s apartment than she knew that she had the right to, playing with his cat (a Siamese whom he had named Alexander der Groß, much to her amusement) or sometimes looking at the photographs that he had liberally placed around the apartment. One of them was an old polaroid of what must have been him with his wife and parents when he graduated from law school, one was a polaroid wedding photo, and one was a polaroid of Arthur kissing him on the cheek dated from when he must have first moved to Canada. She thought that this last picture was a bit weird for Klemens to have, but assumed that both of them had been drunk when the photo was taken. The last polaroid photo on the shelf was a photo of him with Sasha, and it was dated from Sasha’s last birthday. This must have been from about a month before Sasha started seeing her brother. It was a simple, cute photo of them at an outdoor ice rink, and both of their faces were red from the cold. In the photo, Klemens looked at Sasha as if he meant the world to him, but Sasha clearly didn’t notice. The fact that this photo in which everything was just so much simpler than it was now seemed bizarre to Caroline.

Out of all of the photos that Klemens had, the one that entranced her the most was, however, his wedding photo. This one had been dated around five year ago now, which surprised Caroline. Wasn’t Klemens only twenty-seven? And he had already been married for five years? The thought seemed ridiculous to her. The picture was just of Klemens and Maria Eleonore kissing with the stereotypical Austrian alps in the background, but still it presented the sentimental side of Klemens that he only ever showed to people that he loved. The one thing that was evident from all of these photos was that Klemens was more sentimental than he liked to appear after all, and that there was something about polaroid photos which

Caroline sighed; without giving any great deal of thought to it, she had amassed enough information about Klemens that she had nothing to do with any of it and more questions than she had started out with about him.

\---

                It was one day when Caroline was leaving the house to go to work that she saw Arthur leaving at the same time. Leo had told Caroline the other day that Arthur had gotten into some sort of conflict with his girlfriend, Giuseppina (whom she had never met), so she was kind of hesitant to talk to him. When she did, however, he seemed to be just as alright as he always had been.

                “Where are you going?” Arthur asked her as they walked down the hallway to the stairwell together. He’d had this exact conversation with Sasha many, many times.

                Caroline sighed. “I’m off to work,” she answered. “Where are _you_ going?”

                “I’m picking up Klemens from the airport.”

                “Can’t he drive himself?” asked Caroline as the two traversed the stairs together. Arthur smiled and shook his head.

                “He’s a smart guy, but his fatal flaw is that he can never remember where he parked his car and can’t be bothered to drive to the airport himself because of it. He’s been jetting off to Austria every other month because his wife is pregnant.”

                ‘ _That’s bad shit,’_ thought Caroline.

                Arthur continued, “You know, I haven’t seen Sasha in a while.”

                “He’s in the mother country dealing with some personal stuff. I have no idea when he’s coming back, though.”

“That’s a shame. Is he doing alright?”

“We don’t know,” Caroline shook her head. “We haven’t heard from him for about a week. We think he’s staying there another week because he wants to vote in the election over there, but nobody really knows at this point.”

“I hope he’s doing alright.” Arthur didn’t know Sasha _particularly_ well, but he knew him well enough to know that he was probably one of the most tender people whom he had ever met.

The last thing that Caroline said before they went their separate ways was, “We do too.”

\---

                Another week passed, and because Leo and Caroline had settled into some convoluted daily routine by this point, nothing eventful had happened in the whole past week. There was working, and there was eating, and there was walking, and there was sleeping, but that constituted pretty much all of what either of them were up to.

                “Do you remember our dad, Caroline?” Leo asked her one day as they were eating dinner. “Do you remember him at all?”

                Caroline shrugged. “Bits and pieces,” she replied. “We don’t really talk about him at home. We don’t really talk about you, either.”

                “I see.” Leo didn’t know how to react.

                “It’s not anything personal,” Caroline continued. “It’s just that none of us really knew you growing up, and afterwards nobody liked Josephine, and now Mama doesn’t approve of the fact that you’re gay.”

                “First, of all, I’m _not_ gay,” Leo said defensively; he knew that it was a bit irrational, but almost nothing offended him more than when people assumed that he was gay. “And second of all, how does she even know?”

                “I told her that you live with your partner who happens to be a man.”

                “And she told the rest of you that she doesn’t approve but hasn’t breathed a word to me about it?” Because Leo assumed that he was on very good terms with his mother, this came as a shock to him.

                “Well,” Caroline took the trouble to point out, “she didn’t really say it like that. She just told the rest of us that she doesn’t approve of you living that sort of lifestyle.”

                “How is that not personal?”

                “Oh, it’s very personal,” Caroline said, “I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

                “You might just be one of the most blunt people I’ve met in my entire life.”

                “It’s either that or being insincere.”

                Leo sighed. “In this case, I would choose insincere every time.” As long as Leo heard what he wanted to hear, everything would be fine in his world.

\---

                Meanwhile, as they often liked to do, Arthur and Klemens had afternoon tea at a nearby tea room to spend time with each other. Ever since the time last month that Arthur had yelled at Klemens to stop being such a prick already, they hadn’t talked much; Arthur refused to apologize to Klemens for anything he said, and Klemens was too self-assured to take any criticism to heart.

                “You know, Klemens,” Arthur said when they were there, “I just realized that I don’t even like tea. I think that I only drink it because I feel like I should like it. I’ve been pretending to like tea for thirty years.”

                “You know what, Arthur? I don’t like tea either. I only drink it because you liked it and because Sasha likes it. Do you just want to go get coffee?”

                “Yes, I do.”

                So, instead of afternoon tea, the two had afternoon coffee, which was _much_ more enjoyable for both of them.

                “So you almost broke up with Giuseppina while I was gone” asked Klemens.

“Technically, she almost broke up with _me_ , but it’s not really a big thing. Long distance relationships are hard, and it’s not like she’s ever going to move back here or like I’m going to move over there, so at this point it’s kind of just stalling when to break up already. We’ll probably break up in the first few months of next year, I’m not that broken up about it, really.” But from the expression on Arthur’s face, Klemens could tell that it was clearly a big thing to Arthur. Nevertheless, that was the end of that conversation.

                “Work has been pretty terrible lately,” Arthur continued. “Ever since Sasha hasn’t been around to occupy him, Leo’s been at the lab far more often, so that means that I have to see him far more often, too. The guy’s a workaholic.”

                “I asked his sister to water my plants and feed Alexander der Groß while I was gone. I think that the person I missed most while I was gone was Alexander.”

                “He’s not a person, he’s a _cat_.”

                “Don’t be rude, Sasha’s not a cat.”

                Arthur finally put two and two together. “Is Sasha short for Alexander?” he asked.

                “You didn’t know that?” Klemens paused. “In any case, I did mean my cat. He’s my only friend in this godforsaken world.”

                “Klemens, he’s not a person. He’s a _cat_.”

                “That means _nothing_ to me.”

                Arthur changed the subject again. He said, “In any case, I really hope that Caroline didn’t see that terrible photo of me.”

                “Oh, you mean the one where you’re kissing me?”

                Sighing, Arthur thought, ‘ _I hate him so much.’_ “That one.”

                “No, I think that’s a nice photo. I put it right next to my wedding photo and my graduation photo.”

                “Did you really? Is it _that_ important to you?”

                Klemens smiled. “It’s a reminder that you actually liked me at one point.”

                “Another reason that I want you to get rid of it.” Arthur closed his eyes and took a sip of his coffee. “Listen,” he said, “this might sound weird… you know what, I don’t actually care if it sounds weird, but why are you so fixated on the fact that I used to be obsessed with you?”

                “Well, _obsessed_ is a nice word.” When Klemens paused to think about what Arthur had just said, Arthur spoke again.

                He said, “You don’t have to make it weird.”

                “ _You’re_ the one who keeps making it a whole _thing_.”

                Arthur now understood that as long as his old interest in Klemens kept on hanging in the air, it was just going to cause tension and neither of them would let go of it. He decided to give closure to it once and for all. He sighed again, this time more exasperatedly than before. Despite everything, he really liked Klemens, he _did_ , but the two of them were so different that trying to understand the other man exhausted him to no end.

                “Listen, I _really_ wanted to be with you at one point and asked you out on a date, but now that’s all over, okay? We don’t have to keep on talking about it.”

                “The past is in the past,” Klemens agreed. “We don’t have to keep on talking about it. I just can’t get over the fact that _you_ of all people actually had a crush on me.”

                “Now you’re just being insensitive.”

                “Okay, I’m done.”

                Arthur rolled his eyes at Klemens as if to say, ‘ _Yeah, alright, whatever.’_ “I really do miss him, though, I do,” he said.

                “Who? Sasha?”

                “Yeah… he’s been gone for a while now, hasn’t he?”

                “It’s been three weeks that he’s been in Russia because his father and sister both died within days of each other.” Klemens looked at the ground. “Drunk driving, you know, is a hell of a thing. A really terrible thing.”

                “Leo’s sister said that he was dealing with personal matters, but I had no idea what they actually were until now.” Arthur shook his head in pity. “Nobody deserves that, least of all him.”

                Klemens’s phone began to vibrate in his front pocket, and thinking that it might be a client, he checked to see whom it was. “Speak of the devil…”

                “…and he shall call you on the phone.”

                “Sorry, I have to take this,” Klemens said to Arthur.

                “ _Hello?”_ he asked. “How are you doing?... I’m sorry… in two days?... at what time?... ten?... Okay, I’ll see you then.” He ended the call and sighed. “He wants me to pick him up at the airport in two days. He sounds terrible.”

                Perhaps it was because of the rough connection that they had had over the phone, but Klemens really hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that Sasha sounded terrible. He sounded… dejected, and depressed, and just as if he was willing to do anything to leave the place he was currently in. Because of the circumstances, however, Klemens completely understood from whence all of his negativity was coming from.

                It had been a month, and surely, throughout all of his misery, Sasha had changed in ways that Klemens wouldn’t be able to quantify. He loved him. He loved him more than he loved anyone else in the world. But even that did nothing to quell the anxiety of seeing him again.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls comment thanks


	16. "unhapppy"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leo interrupted him. “I don’t know why you’re being so…”
> 
> “Stubborn?" interrupted Sasha. "Annoying? A pain in the ass?”
> 
> “I never said any of those words.” Leo sighed. Sometimes he forgot that Sasha was so much younger and more inexperienced than he was.

                It was about a month before Sasha came back from Saint Petersburg, and when he did, on September twenty-first, Leo, Caroline, and Klemens all stood waiting for him at the international terminal of the airport. Caroline had taken special precaution to remember where Klemens had parked his car.

                When Sasha finally met all three of them for the first time after his long absence, he was unreadable. He didn’t recognize this old-new atmosphere of the airport, didn’t know what to think or how to feel about it, and just wanted to go home already. He gave the three of them quick embraces to let them know that he _was_ happy to see them all, and then said, “It’s good to see all of you again. Let’s go home.”

                The first thing that Sasha did when he returned home for the first time was sleep. He immediately passed out upon their living room sofa, and no one decided to disturb him until he woke up of his own accord. He slept for eighteen hours, until the intrinsic fatigue in him was gone. When he woke up at four in the morning, the house was more still and quiet than he had ever remembered it being before. Even Leo, who _always_ woke up before him, was still sound asleep.

                The first thing he did was walk quietly to their refrigerator and see if they had any milk. He wasn’t surprised when they didn’t have any; he lived with two French people, and the French infamously hated drinking milk. Then, without even making an attempt to look better than he did in his disheveled state, he left the house to buy milk.

                Leo woke up about three hours later. When he came into the living room, he looked at the still-disheveled Sasha and said, “Good morning.” He wanted to tell Sasha that he really looked terrible but thought that it would be insensitive.

                “Good morning,” said Sasha. He spoke totally casually, and for a moment, it was as if everything was normal again. “How are you, Leo?”

                “I haven’t seen you in a month. How are _you_?”

                “Not great, admittedly. It’s been a horribly rough past month.”  

                “You want to talk about it?”

                “Maybe later.”

                “I love you, Sasha. I’ve missed you so much. You don’t have to tell me about what happened while you were in Russia, but if you do…” he paused. He wasn’t used to trying to sound so sympathetic. “You can tell me, okay? You can tell me whenever.”

                “There wasn’t a moment that I was in Russia that I didn’t wish I was home.” Sasha spoke with such a tone of formality that it made Leo slightly uncomfortable to converse with him. He changed the subject, evidently wanting to leave all of his recent memories of being in Russia behind him. “I woke up at 4 in the morning and now I’m baking milk.”

                “You went out and bought milk?” Leo asked. “At four in the morning? That’s incredibly unsafe, Sasha.”

                “You think that anyone is going to try to mug me?”

                They had discussed the issue of Sasha’s likelihood of getting mugged before, and Leo fondly recalled getting picked up and almost thrown into a trash can. He sighed. “You’re right. Nobody is going to mug you.”

                After not seeing each other for a month, this first interaction was far more painfully awkward than either of them wanted it to be.

                “What have you been up to for the past month?” Sasha asked.

                “Working,” answered Leo, “and working and more working. I’ve been at the lab for ten or eleven hours every day recently. The house has been too quiet to be productive. I’ve never lived alone and I never want to.”

                “But you live with your sister.”

                “Some days she would leave the house in the morning and not come back until around nightfall. I don’t know what she does with all of her time.”

                Sasha glanced sideways, as if he was paranoid that someone was standing right behind him. “Being in Russia was horrible, Leo,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone die before, but going to two funerals in two weeks was the worst experience of my life.”

                Leo took Sasha’s hand in his own and stroked it gently. “I’m sorry, Sasha… If you don’t mind if I ask, what happened?”

                Looking back towards Leo, Sasha answered, “It was a fatal car crash. I never… I never want to drive ever again. I never want to see any of those people ever again. Especially my brother. I never want to see him ever again.”

                He continued. “I’ve been an expatriate for maybe two and a half years, you know, but he acts like he barely even knows me. He doesn’t like me, and probably for good reason, but we grew up together!” Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t know. I would rather have not known and not gone than have to endure Kostya treating me like I’m a stranger to him. There’s too much that hurts and not enough time to process any if it without feeling like a outcast to everyone.”

                “But it’s fine,” he added suddenly. “The damage has already been done, and there’s nothing else to be done about it.”

                Sasha was clearly not fine, but Leo didn’t want to press him about it if it made him so melancholy and uncomfortable to talk about. The two sat in silence for some time until the oven dinged loudly in the other room.

                “Oh,” noted Sasha, not bothering to move at all, “the milk must be done.”

                “Aren’t you going to get up to check on it?”

                He just looked at Leo as if he understood nothing, and as if he held all of the secrets to the universe. “Eh, maybe later.”

                It was while he said, “Eh, maybe later,” that Sasha realized that after such a long absence and drought from Leo’s presence that he didn’t feel nearly the same way he used to about him. Whether this was a good or a bad thing he still didn’t know, but whereas before he had felt as if he was ready to go mad for his love, now the fire of his passion had quelled and he felt instead a placid feeling coming over him while he was in Leo’s presence. He didn’t see Leo as some unattainable being anymore; however, now more than ever, he felt that he _needed_ him as a source of stability in his life.

                Leo stood up, and, kissing Sasha on the cheek, asked him, “Have you eaten anything?”

                Sasha had to think about it for a second. “No,” he answered.

                “Not since getting home?”

                “Not since before boarding my flight in Saint Petersburg.”

                “That’s forty-three hours. Come on, you have to eat something.” Coming from Leo, who barely knew how to feed himself, this meant a lot.

                “I’m baking milk,” Sasha pointed out.

                “That’s not _real_ food.”

                “Excuse me, _ryazhenka_ is a traditional Russian…”

                Leo interrupted him. “I don’t know why you’re being so…”

                “Stubborn? Annoying? A pain in the ass?”

                “I never said _any_ of those words.” Leo knew that Sasha was probably subconsciously being as stubborn as possible after being treated as an outcast for a month and thus forgave him, but that didn’t change the fact that he was seriously getting on his nerves right now. He sighed. Sometimes he forgot that Sasha was so much younger and more inexperienced than he was.

                “Please just tell me what you want.”

                “I just…” Sasha didn’t know what he wanted. “I just want some peace and quiet. I wish it was nighttime all the time, like when there’s no one out on the streets and it seems like they belong to you when you’re the only one awake. I just… I suppose right now I kind of just want to feel like I belong somewhere instead of feeling like mother Russia’s bastard child.” He smiled at the notion of him being “mother Russia’s bastard child”. He continued, “I mean, my family hates me, I live in French Canada, I’m gay, and I’m fairly certain that I’m the only gay Russian expatriate living in French Canada. I don’t know. It’s a bit cliché, but in the painful dichotomy of _us versus them,_ unfortunately, I’m fated to always be one of _them_.”

                Leo less than fondly recalled the days of his adolescence when he had just moved to the hexagon of mainland France and still spent a disproportionate amount of mental energy trying to figure out how to assimilate without cutting the extra vowels out of his name. Even now, he still abhorred being asked where he was from, and so, he completely understood where Sasha was coming from. “You’ve been thinking about this a lot, haven’t you?”

                “Only every day.”

                “It’s times like this when you wish you were an imperial majesty, huh?”

                “Don’t I always?”

\---

                As the days continued to pass by, Sasha at least made attempts to get integrated back into the life that he had left so suddenly, but that was all that could be said: he made attempts.

                The easiest thing for him to overcome was the jetlag, but after that, he lagged in everything else. He began to truly enjoy going in to work at six in the morning every day, but only because it gave him something to do and somewhere to be. He actually became more productive in his depression and was constantly creating, reading, ice skating, doing _whatever_ to better himself because he didn’t want to have any time to think about what he was doing or where he was headed. And most importantly, he found, he couldn’t _stand_ being alone. If he wasn’t working then he was with Leo, and if he wasn’t with Leo then he was with Caroline or Klemens, and if he wasn’t with either of them then he was either with his second-tier friends or trying to find something to do or someone to talk to.

                When Sasha wanted to be with people, he didn’t necessarily have to _talk_ to them; in fact, he probably talked less now than he ever had before, but he just wanted to be in the general vicinity of someone. Countless hours were spent silently knitting (a new skill) next to Leo or sitting and trying to sketch people and things while Klemens worked at his desk a few feet away. What he didn’t understand was that Leo was usually silent around him because he had known his own fair share of sorrow and wanted to give Sasha space, but that Klemens was silent around him because he had never known what it was like to suffer.

                Sasha wasn’t good at drawing by any means, but sooner or later he noticed that every figure he drew, all of which were figments of his imagination, seemed to be bits and pieces of people he knew in real life grotesquely melded together. Here was a girl who had Maria’s lips and eyes and Kostya’s everything else. Here was another character who looked like Leo but _wasn’t_. Sasha knew that none of his work would be original no matter how he wished it would be, and this infuriated him to no end. He began to think that he would never be good at anything no matter what he did, and then wondered why he bothered to do anything at all.

                One day, Klemens finally said to him, “Sasha, I love you and know that you’ve been going through some hard times lately, but you _need_ to stop coming to my house every day for hours at a time.” Klemens spoke as though he had been postponing saying this to Sasha for a long, long time.

                “Why?” Sasha asked. “Do you not like me anymore?” He seemed completely unfazed by this prospect.

                “No,” Klemens shook his head. “No, no… no, Sasha, it’s just that I want you to stop.”

                “Why?”

                “I think that you’re trying to use it as a coping mechanism and I can’t be complicit with that,” he said. “You know that I would be _more_ than happy to spend time with you at any given moment,, but given the circumstances, I don’t think that it’s healthy for you.”

                Klemens continued, “Listen, I don’t want to make you feel like I don’t love you or care about you, but you’ve been acting completely different ever since you came back from Russia, and I _know_ that you don’t like talking about your problems, but I really think that it would benefit you.” He felt as if he was talking down to Sasha and thought that Sasha would be angry at him for it, but to his surprise, he wasn’t.

                Klemens continued, “You can talk to me, or to _him_ , or to a licensed therapist, but whatever it is, it’s clearly bothering you a _lot_.”

                Sasha listened to what Klemens had to say, mulled it over in his mind, and finally said, “You really want me to talk to you about my problems?”

                Nodding, Klemens said, “I love you, Sasha, and of course I won’t tell anyone, and I’m a lawyer and I’ve seen some absolutely crazy shit so I’m not going to judge you for whatever you have to say.”

                “I don’t even know where to start…” sighed Sasha. “I don’t really talk about Russia ever… for all I’m concerned, my life started after I moved to Canada.”

                “You don’t have to tell me now if you’re not ready.”

                “No,” he shook his head, “I think that I’ve postponed talking about myself for too long now, and…” he reached out and touched Klemens’s hand. He continued, “I trust you, maybe more than I trust anyone else, Klemens. But I don’t even know where to start.”

                Sasha decided that he would tell Klemens everything that he had neglected to tell anyone for twenty-three years, and for that to happen, he would have to start at the beginning, the very beginning, but he didn’t know where that was. He took a deep breath. He loved Klemens. He trusted Klemens. The very beginning…

                “Well, when I was younger my parents traveled around a lot and didn’t have any time to take care of me, so my younger brother and I, we both lived with my paternal grandmother Catherine. Kostya and I didn’t get along much because we were both so different, but I liked to think that we were brotherly enough to help each other out in a pinch. While I wasn’t a doormat by any means, I was always quieter, more reserved, and more softly spoken, while Kostya was outgoing, restless, and passionate about whatever he did, which apparently included hating me. He always had more friends than I did; people just liked him, while they hardly ever paid attention to me. And that was fine, and I mean really, I didn’t really care, because I had no interest in interacting with any of those people, and anyway, I was our grandmother’s favorite, so it ultimately didn’t matter.

                “I did pretty well in school, but not spectacular by any means. My least favorite subject was _always_ Russian literature- god, I hated all of it so much, can you imagine? I hated memorizing poetry and reading the long archaic novels that I didn’t care about in the slightest. I think that the only books that I ever really enjoyed that we had to read for school were the ones from Stalinist Russia, and I know that it’s perhaps a Russian stereotype, but I also _really_ liked _War and Peace_. I mean, I don’t really like the _war_ parts because they can get remarkably boring, and I know that this is stupid, but I think that I really liked it because I had a crush on one of the main characters. I had a crush on Nikolai Rostov, and I think that realizing that was not only embarrassing at first, I mean, he’s a character from a novel, but it was almost at that moment that everything sort of _clicked_ for me, that I was a gay man living in Russia and that was just my place in society. So, because of that, that book just became incredibly important in deciding who I was. I think everyone has that, you know, that moment when you realize, ‘ _hey, I’m gay,’_ and ‘ _hey, I’m in love,’_ and ‘ _hey, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’_ ”

                Klemens interjected, “I’ve never had that.”

                “That’s a real shame, it is. It’s wonderful to just begin to _know_.”

                “I think I’ve just always known who I am and what I want to do.”

                “Perhaps that’s even better,” said Sasha, “but I wouldn’t know. I’m still searching for the latter.” For the first time since he received that phone call from Kostya, Sasha began to feel like himself again. “I think that _belonging_ is one of the most fundamental aspects of happiness, and without it, there’s nothing. I think that’s why…

                “I think that’s why I was unhappy when I lived in Russia, and that’s why I was so unhappy when I went back. I think that’s why Leo gets so disproportionately offended whenever you ask him where he’s from. I think it’s because…” Sasha paused as his eyes filled up with tears. “I think it’s because when you’re an alien no matter where you go, you keep on roaming, and nowhere feels like home anymore. I’m undeniably Russian of course- I was born there and I grew up there and still even identify with Russia to some extent, but all of the people who kept me tied to it are either dead, fictional, or don’t care about me anymore. All I have left are things like my accent, my mannerisms, and the memories of the time when I thought that alienation and home were synonymous with each other. I can’t control any of that. If I moved back there nobody would bat an eye at me, but I would _know_ that I didn’t belong there. That’s the thing, Klemens, it’s that I don’t have anywhere or anyone to go back to anymore. I have you, and I have Leo, and I have Caroline, and I have a boy who consists of ink on paper, and that’s it. And sometimes I feel like I can’t be myself around Leo, and I can’t be with you, either. So all I have is this illegitimate marriage to a character from a novel and the rubbish ends of the idea that moving to Canada would be good for me, all along.”

                He took a deep breath. “It’s all my fault, you know, it’s all my fault. I try to accept it, but it’s too painful to reconcile myself with. Everything is my fault, Klemens, everything is my fault and I can’t help but be complicit with it. There’s just so much _bad_ in the world that I can’t help but feel like there _is_ one inherent truth to life, after all, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for, either. I can’t help but feel that… that after twenty-three years of questioning myself over and over again, some of my convictions _must_ be correct, but I don’t know which ones they are and I doubt that I ever will, because the inherent truth of life that I want to uncover is an umbrella for all of the more subtle, more nuanced meanings and lessons beneath it. All I know for certain is that the magnanimity of the world is a concept that only applies to the people who want to thrust their hearts and souls into it, and _while_ I desperately want to believe that life has any sort of meaning, given everything else, it’s impossible.

                “Everything comes in layers of good and bad, and it’s all so ambiguous that I can’t help but think that if there’s no clear moral path that these random events are taking, then perhaps it doesn’t matter at all. Everyone who chooses to believe that the world is a bright place or that it is dreary within itself is looking through a microscope at the miracles and events that please them, and see nothing else, but the fact of the matter is that everything is multifaceted and that being complicit in someone’s happiness is being complicit in someone else’s pain, and vice versa.

                “And that’s the thing, Klemens,” Sasha realized suddenly. “I don’t know _who_ or _if_ anyone is benefitting from my unhappiness and suffering, but I think that someone _has_ to because that’s just the way that things work. But the unhappier I get, the more I seem to be a burden on everyone around me, and I don’t… I don’t _want_ that. I don’t want to suffer if my suffering has no purpose or meaning except to make me even more unhappy. I don’t want to suffer just for the sake of suffering.” And with those words, Sasha was done.

                ‘ _Sasha wins the award for making long-winded points that don’t make any sense,’_ thought Klemens. As someone who had never really experienced any pain of the sort, he didn’t know how to react to anything that Sasha had just said.

                “I’m sorry, that was stupid,” said Sasha before Klemens could say anything. “Just forget everything I just said.”

                The room was silent except for the noise of the wind rustling through the trees outside and stripping them of their leaves. The sun had gone down a long time ago, and all that lit Klemens’s small living room was the dim lamp that he had lit on a side table. Sasha began to stare at the ground uncomfortably as if he was waiting for Klemens to say something. When no words came to Klemens, he reprimanded himself for it.

                He thought to himself, ‘ _Come on, that was the first time in Sasha’s life that he has ever opened up to anybody. Say something! Do something! Don’t just make him regret it.”_

                Without thinking about it, Klemens and Sasha slowly leaned towards each other, gently caressing each other’s faces until they finally met in a kiss. It was the first time that they had kissed since before all of this had happened, and for a brief moment, Sasha felt as if all of his miseries in the world were alleviated from him. They continued to slowly kiss for a few more minutes until they pulled apart briefly.

                “Sasha,” Klemens finally said, “I love you so much.” It was perhaps the first time that Klemens had ever told Sasha that he loved him of his own accord.

                “Even now?” Sasha asked as Klemens tried to wipe the almost-dry tears from his eyes.

                Klemens nodded. “Now more than ever,” he said, kissing Sasha again. “Now better than ever.”

It was now that Sasha realized that if Klemens loved him now more than ever after his strife and subsequent unhappiness, then if anything, _Klemens_ was the one who benefitted from his pain. He knew that to think that way was utterly convoluted and that Klemens was the one who had tried to help him the most out of anyone, but once the thought entered his head, he couldn’t force it out or stop thinking about it.

                “Klemens,” he said on some outlandish whim that suddenly overcame him, “let’s get married.”

                Shaking his head, Klemens replied, “We legally cannot do that.” He didn’t know why Sasha was saying this now or where he was going with it, but Sasha was so emotionally unstable at this point that he felt that something terrible was about to happen.

                “But Klemens, I want to be your husband.”

                “I’m already married.”

                “Get a divorce.” Neither of them knew it yet, but this interaction was merely the eye of the hurricane.

                “Sasha, where are you going with this?”

                When Sasha spoke again, his voice was abnormally placid. “Klemens,” he said, “if we were to get married, we could buy a house, and live together, and sleep together, and not have to do any of this secretive stuff, and be together all the time… Klemens, don’t you know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you? That I feel intoxicated when I’m around you?”

                ‘ _I regret ever having asked Sasha to talk about his feelings.’_ He shook his head, before he finally admitted. “I don’t want to be in love with you Sasha, and truth be told, I wish that I wasn’t. It’s just the way that things happened, and there’s no avoiding it. I want to be with you forever, but it’s just impossible because of the preexisting conditions surrounding our relationship. I have a life outside of you… I’m married, I have a career… and that’s just the way things are.”

                “I don’t want things to end where they started. I don’t want to go back to Saint Petersburg.”

                “But that’s the reason you came here in the first place, wasn’t it? Because you wanted to leave before you ended up staying for the rest of your life?”

                “I’m on a work visa and planned to go back when I turn twenty-five, but then I fell in love and it ruined everything.”

                “You fell for Leo, not for _me_ ,” Klemens pointed out. “You’re staying because being loved for the first time in your life made you realize how ostracized you were everywhere else. Isn’t that the truth? None of that involves me.”

                “But I love you.”

                “And I love you too, and I want to be with you, but I understand that it’s impossible because love isn’t as strong as you think it is.”

                “That’s easy for you to say… you cheated on your wife.”

                “So did you. I mean, you didn’t cheat on your _wife_ because you don’t have one, but you get what I’m saying. I’m not any more at fault than you are.”

                Sasha sighed. “It’s hard to think of someone like Leo as a victim; he’s too calculative; he’s only wrong when it comes to how adept he thinks he is at everything.”

                “But that doesn’t change the fact of the matter.”

                “Why does it have to happen like this?”

                Klemens looked at Sasha with both pity and regret in his eyes. “It’s because we met at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “In fact, it’s a mistake that we met at all. A beautiful mistake, perhaps, but terrible nonetheless.”

                Before he had time to think about it, Sasha felt his eyes fill up with tears again, and before he had the chance to stop it, he began to cry. These were long, convulsive sobs which he couldn’t hold back or control in any way, and he hated it; he hated the fact that he was so prone to crying at any given moment, and that there was nothing he could do about it. He had cried so much in the past two months that he never wanted to cry again in his life, but he knew that it was inevitable.

                Klemens gently put a hand on Sasha’s back, and said as softly as he could, “It’s okay, Sasha, everything will be okay, just calm down…” It took a few minutes before Sasha calmed down enough to say words.

                “It’s… it’s not, Klemens…” he said, trying to breathe enough to be able to speak. “I-it’s j… it’s just… n-not.” After about thirty seconds when his tears had quelled a bit more, he continued, “And you know what? It won’t be.” He gestured to the empty space in between himself and Klemens. “None of _this_ will ever be okay.”

                “I’m just a bad person, alright?” he said. “I don’t know how I’ll go back home and see Leo again after I’ve already said and done everything that I’ve said and done. I hurt him and didn’t take any remorse from it at all, and now I realize that that’s just something that I’m going to have to live with. I love him, Klemens, I love him a lot, but I betrayed him, and that’s just something that I’m going to have to live with.”

                “You’re not a bad person,” whispered Klemens, “no matter what you think. You just have bad circumstances.”

                Sasha looked up at him through his tears, and mumbled, “And when does something stop being part of the circumstances around you and start being a part of your character?”

                Once again, Klemens didn’t know how to answer him.

\---

                After he finished saying everything that he had to say, Sasha continued to cry into Klemens for a long time as Klemens kept on whispering to him, “ _I love you, I love you, I love you, you’re so young, Sasha, you have so much time, I love you...”_ He didn’t know whether this made the situation better or worse, but something told him that this was the last time that he was going to see Sasha for a long, long time. While this saddened him to the extent that he could have cried a bit too if he wanted to, he didn’t because it wouldn’t accomplish anything. When Sasha decided that he was done crying for the rest of his life, Klemens’s shirt was soaked through with tears, and Sasha’s inability to cry for Klemens anymore brought a sense of closure to their entire relationship so far.

                ‘ _And to think,’_ thought Sasha, ‘ _I’ve only known him for a year. And to think that I might never see him again after today.’_

                When he finally left Klemens’s apartment late into the night, Klemens asked him, “It’s pretty late… are you sure that you don’t want me to drive you home?” He knew that Sasha would decline, but it was just a formality.

                “I’m sure,” said Sasha, who looked terrible in the broadest sense of the word. “Thanks for putting up with me.”

                “Yeah…” Klemens didn’t know what to say anymore. “Listen, if you ever need anything, or if you ever need help, then you can always come to me, okay? Please just tell me if you ever need anything.”

                “Thanks, Klemens. I’ll… see you later.”

                “I’ll see you later.” ‘ _Whatever later means.’_ He closed the door to his apartment and looked back at the empty space that was always the same whether Sasha was here or not, and he sighed. He walked over to the shelf where he kept his most important polaroid photos, and looked over them for a second. It had been a long night, and he was tired. He smiled a bit when he looked at the first three, a photo from the day he graduated law school, his wedding photo, and an old one of him and Arthur from when he first moved to Canada, but his face fell again when he looked at the fourth one, which was a picture of him and Sasha from the time that they had gone ice skating on his birthday.

                Those had been such simpler times.

                Closing his eyes, he turned the frame around so that he couldn’t see the photo anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls comment thanks


	17. life moved on

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life went on without Klemens von Metternich. For all Sasha knew, it might even have been better without him. While there remained a pit in his heart of longing for the other man, little by little he learned to move on with his life again, and sooner or later, everything was as close to normal again as it could possibly have been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> enjoy

                When Sasha came home that night, the night that he decided that he couldn’t live with himself the way he had been before, he couldn’t help but cry even though he felt that he had nothing more to cry about at this point. He didn’t know how late it was, but only knew that it was late enough that the sun had gone down long ago and that he had had to rush to take the last bus home because he didn’t want to walk the entire way here.

                When he came home that night, Leo was still at their living room sofa filling out paperwork because he had a conference to go to sooner or later, and before he glanced up at Sasha, said, “Well, you’re home rather late…” When he _did_ see Sasha’s forlorn state, however, he said, “Sasha, why are you crying? You look… terrible.” Sasha was generally very sensitive, so Leo had seen him cry before, but he had never seen him so evidently heartbroken.

                Sasha _knew_ that he looked terrible, and he dearly wished that Leo wasn’t here right now, or, for the first time since he had moved in all those months ago, that he still had some place of his own in which he could just get drunk and lock himself whenever he didn’t want to see anyone else. When he opened his mouth to tell Leo that he was _fine_ and just wanted to go to sleep, he just began to sob again. He threw himself down on the sofa beside Leo, and as Leo tried to comfort him by stroking his face and his hair, quietly choked out, “Leo, I did something really… t-terrible, and I don’t want to tell you about it, but…”

                He paused as he tried to collect himself. If he couldn’t bring himself to tell Leo the whole truth, then surely he could bring himself to tell… not even a half-truth, but perhaps about fifteen percent of the actual truth.

                “Listen,” he said, slowly calming himself down as he spoke, “he’s… I mean, Klemens is… he’s in love with me. He’s in love with me,” he repeated, just for good measure.

                “ _I know,”_ Leo whispered softly.

                “And I knew about it for a long, long time, I could tell, but I didn’t _know_ until…” Sasha paused. “Tonight,” he continued, “he… kissed me and told me that he loved me, and I didn’t know what to say to him after that.”           

                “Sasha…” Leo wanted to be angry at Sasha for having kissed Klemens, but when he remembered that he had only gotten into his

                “Do I stop seeing him? He’s my best friend, my closest friend in the world, and I love him so, but do I stop seeing him for this? Is it a vice to love someone whom you can never be with? I’m so sorry, Leo, I’m so sorry.”

                “Sasha, you didn’t do anything wrong. Stop apologizing.”

                Sasha wanted to tell Leo that everything was completely his fault, and that he had led Klemens on, fallen in love with him without realizing it, kissed him countless times, and even made love to him, but he _couldn’t_. He didn’t know whether it was because he wanted to protect himself or whether he didn’t want to hurt Leo’s feelings, but whatever it was, he felt as if it stemmed from selfishness and selfishness alone. “I’m sorry.”

                “Sasha, it’s _okay_.”

                “I’m so, so sorry. Leo, I need you to know that I love you. I love you so much. I love you more than I can possibly express to you in words.”

                “I love you, and I’m… I’m not mad at you for something that Klemens did, okay?”

                “Okay.”

                As Sasha wiped his remaining tears away, Leo said to him softly, “It’s been a long night. You and I, we should both go to sleep.”

                Sasha looked at the ground and then at Leo. It was whenever Leo showed the gentle, caring side of him- the side that didn’t work himself up over everything, the side which was able to understand instead of just holding meaningless grudges- that Sasha loved him most. It was times like these, and especially now that he could have come so close to losing him, when Sasha remembered that Leo was a real person with real emotions who had the potential to be vulnerable. In Sasha’s mind, this was just like that time when they had just become friends and Leo had almost gotten frostbite on his hands, only this time it was Sasha and not Leo’s own stubbornness that was hurting him.

                And, looking at Leo’s face in the dim light of the lamp in the living room, Sasha remembered all of the reasons that he had fallen in love with him in the first place.

                He sighed. “Leo, you really shouldn’t read or do work in dim light. It’s bad for your eyes,” he said.

                “Why are you telling me this now?”

                “It’s because I care about you… a lot. I don’t want you to have bad eyesight.” He frowned and gestured towards his own glasses on his face. “It sucks.”

                Leo smiled slightly. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

                “I love you a lot, you know.”

                “I know. I love you too.”

                “Can I kiss you?”

                “You don’t even need to ask.” Sasha leaned forward and kissed Leo.

                “Seriously, both of us should go to sleep.”

                “Okay,” said Sasha. “You should go. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

                “Okay.”

                As Leo left the room, Sasha thought again on the eventful past few hours that he just lived through, thinking about all of the things he had said to Klemens and contemplating the fact that they might never see each other again. He then thought about his relationship with Leo and how much he really did love him. He finally decided that maybe for _all_ of them- for himself, for Leo, for Klemens, for Caroline, for Arthur, for Maria Eleonore von Metternich, for Giuseppina, for Kostya, even for Quebec City and for Saint Petersburg- it was best that he and Klemens didn’t see each other again for a long, long time.

\---

                Life went on without Klemens von Metternich. For all Sasha knew, it might even have been better without him. While there remained a pit in his heart of longing for the other man, little by little he learned to move on with his life again, and sooner or later, everything was as close to normal again as it could possibly have been.

                As summer moved on to autumn and autumn moved on to winter, Sasha readjusted to the world around him and tried to live as if nothing had happened in the first place. Those who were close to him noted that even after he recovered from both his trauma in Russia and the heartbreak of abandoning anything that he might have had with Klemens, he was more pensive about the world, spoke less, and seemed a bit paranoid about everything around him, but ultimately, he was fine. It was just Sasha’s new normal.

                As it became the beginning of December, he began to reflect on everything that had happened in the past year. ‘ _Where was I a year ago?’_ he often wondered. ‘ _I was pining over Leo, thinking that he would never like me, let alone love me. It was a year ago that we were both still working for_ La République…” Whenever Sasha thought about the time when he and Leo were still just co-workers and friends, he felt a sharp pain of nostalgia. Whenever he asked Leo if he remembered something about those old times when they used to work together, it was evident that Leo didn’t want to remember any of them; those, after all, had been the darker moments of his life.

‘ _And that’s right,’_ he thought, ‘ _it was last year when I met Klemens at that coffee place, and… Klemens… I miss him.”_

Life went on without Klemens, and it might even have been better but that didn’t mean that Sasha didn’t miss him dearly.

\---

                It was December when Leo, Sasha, and Caroline all had a day off for the first time in weeks, and they were all still deciding what to do that day.

                “We should go ice skating,” Sasha suggested.

                “The only reason you want to go is so that you can show off,” Leo said in good humor.

                “I agree with _Napoleone_ ,” added Caroline. “Not all of us were junior figure-skating prodigies in Russia.”

                “What does being from Russia have to do with it? You could have just said, ‘ _junior figure skating prodigy’_ and left it at that.”

                “So you admit that you just want to show off?”

                Sasha smiled. “I never said that I didn’t _want_ to in the first place.”

                Sighing, Leo said, “Well, as long as we’re still at home, Caroline, why don’t you go get the mail?”

                “I’ll do it later.”

                “That wasn’t really a question; it was more of a command, Caroline. I’m telling you to go get the mail.”

                “I’ll do it in, like, fifteen minutes.”

                “I let you live here rent-free. The least you could do is go get the mail.”

                “Okay,” Caroline groaned as she stood up and left the apartment to go get the mail. Sasha was always slightly uncomfortable whenever he was around for these types of exchanges between both of the B(u)onaparte siblings, but this one might have been the least painful of all of them; both of them were so horribly stubborn that they could argue with each other over the most menial details for ungodly periods of time.

                “I hate it when you and Caroline argue,” said Sasha. “Especially over who’s going to go get the mail.”

                “That wasn’t an argument.”

                “You know what I mean, though. It happens _all_ the time.” Leo and Caroline didn’t argue often, but when they did, it was _always_ over who was going to go get the mail; neither of them wanted to climb down the flights of stairs that were too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, but Sasha never mediated these arguments because he didn’t want to go get the mail, either. “Do you remember that time when one of you said, ‘I guess we’ll both just sit here until we die,’ and legitimately sat there for forty-five minutes until I got home?”

                “Of _course_ I remember that time. But that was an extreme case.”

                “Of both stubbornness and laziness.”

                “I don’t think that it would be appropriate to apply the word ‘lazy’ in any sense of the term to either me _or_ Caroline… well, maybe Caroline a bit, but not really.”

                “The only thing I don’t like about living with you is that both of you are too damn stubborn.”

                After Sasha said this, Caroline came back into the apartment with one hand full of mail and the other holding a letter which she had evidently received and opened. She held a letter with pale, spidery lettering.

                “Leo, Sasha,” she said as she carefully locked the door behind her, “look at this. It’s a letter from our mom.”

                “What does it say?” asked Leo.

                In response, Caroline walked over and handed him the letter. Leo mentally groaned when he saw that it was written in Corsican, the language that he hadn’t really spoken in so many years. He read the letter once over, and said to Sasha, “It’s about my sister’s wedding that’s apparently in April next year.”

                “What does it say about your sister’s wedding?”

                “Really just that she’s having a wedding and it’s in April next year. I would let you read it but it’s in Corsican.”

                “Wait,” interjected Sasha. “So I know you don’t like to talk about it that much, but are you Italian or French or Corsican? I still don’t really understand, because you’re from France, but you say that your native language is Italian and you grew up in Ajaccio…”

                Caroline jumped in and answered on both of their behalves. “Our family is Italian,” she answered, “so we grew up speaking Italian, but we’re also Corsican, so we both speak Corsican because we lived in Corsica, although we moved to France when we were both fairly young, so we’re also French.”

                Leo nodded. “It’s complicated.”

                “So then, Leo,” Sasha continued, “why is it that you have an accent and don’t consider yourself a native speaker of French, but Caroline does?”

                “Well, I spent most of my early childhood speaking Corsican and Italian, so French isn’t my first language, and I wasn’t that good at it until I went to boarding school in France when I was ten. The rest of my family moved to France when I was sixteen, so Caroline has pretty much lived in France and used French all the time for her entire life.”

                “Wait, but Corsica is a French-speaking island. How did you not learn to speak French well until you were ten?”

                Leo scoffed. “I didn’t _talk_ to other people. I never said anything, so I never became that adept at speaking it.” He still couldn’t spell for the life of him.

                “That _is_ complicated,” Sasha agreed. He still didn’t _completely_ understand the entire Italian-French-Corsican thing, but he felt that he understood well enough that he wouldn’t have to ask for an explanation again.

                Reaching into the envelope that Caroline had handed him again, Leo pulled out another small, ornate card. “Oh,” he said, turning it over. “It’s one of those save-the-date things for Pauline’s wedding to some Charles Leclerc. April sixth in Paris, France.” He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was unenthusiastic about the whole affair, although he himself wasn’t sure whether he was upset because he was jealous or whether he was upset because he didn’t want his _favorite_ sister to get married so young. “We can talk about it later.”

                “Okay,” said Caroline. “So are we going to leave the house anytime soon, or are we just going to wait here and do nothing? It’s already noon.”

                “We should get lunch,” Sasha made another suggestion, “but I don’t have any money. I’m just a broke college student.”

                “You’re not even _in_ college yet,” retorted Caroline before realizing that that was the joke. It was an inside joke between Leo and Sasha at this point that she just didn’t understand the concept of sarcasm. “You already pay for most of the food that I eat, so I’ll pay for you, Sasha.”

                “Okay, then, let’s _go_.”

\---

                After that, it wasn’t long before Sasha’s twenty-fourth birthday crept up on him, and once again, it was laden of memories of last year when he had spent it with Klemens. That was before he felt that his life had truly begun yet, and although he certainly felt as if it had begun now, he still didn’t know whether he could have considered himself objectively happy or not. In the past few months, he had begun to wonder more and more about the larger questions, such as _what_ he was meant to do in this world and _how_ he was to do it. There was someone out there who benefitted from his pain, there was certainly nobody who benefitted from his idleness. And he knew that he wasn’t _idle_ , per se, but constantly felt that he wasn’t living up to his potential- he didn’t know what his potential _was_ or whether he even had one at this point, but he still felt utterly inadequate. He needed a plan for the rest of his life, but because he would inherit enough money to never _need_ a real plan, he didn’t have one. He didn’t know how to make one, either.

                ‘ _What do I really want to do?’_ he often wondered. ‘ _Well, I don’t_ know _what I want to do after I’m done with college. Oh, man, I’m going to college for three years, that’s a real thing that’s actually happening next month…”_

                On his birthday, he decided that he wanted to just forget about it all for a single day and rejoice in the fact that he made it through this year, that he had grown so much as a person since the last (this he wasn’t sure about but wanted to believe), and spend time with his friends and loved ones. He decided to spend the first half of the day with Maria, whom he considered his best friend aside from Klemens, and the latter half with Leo.

                Before he left the house in the morning, he said to Leo, “I hope this one is another golden birthday,” referencing how Leo had told him all that time ago that his last birthday was a golden birthday and that he ought to savor it.

                But to his surprise, Leo asked, “What do you mean? You’re twenty-four.” ‘ _Sasha is really so young.’_

                “ _Oh,”_ Sasha said in a sudden apotheosis of understanding. “It’s because I turned twenty-three last year… and my birthday is on December twenty-third…”

                “Are you referencing how last year I made an offhand comment about how your last birthday was your golden birthday and that you ought to savor it, only it turns out that you didn’t actually know what a golden birthday was and thought it was just some idiomatic expression?”

                “Yeah,” Sasha nodded.

                “And you think I’d just _remember_ saying something that arbitrary?” Leo smiled. “Happy birthday, Sasha.” He gave Sasha a quick kiss. “I’m glad that you were born.”

                Sasha smiled as well, and gave Leo a quick kiss back. “Thanks, Leo. I’ll see you later,” he said as he left the apartment.

\---

                Sasha had originally made plans to meet Maria at the art museum, but after thinking it through more carefully, he decided that he didn’t actually want to go to the art museum; the last time he went to one, that night he received a phone call that two of his family members were dead or dying, so at the last minute he decided that he would rather go to the aquarium, which he had never been to before, and then out for tea. While he didn’t particularly _like_ aquariums, it was a somewhat special thing to do for his birthday, and because it was dead winter, it wasn’t as if doing anything outside was a possibility.

                When he met Maria at the aquarium, she said to him, “Happy birthday!” and handed him a small box.

                Sasha took the box and gave Maria an embrace. “Thank you!” he exclaimed. “I love boxes.” When he opened it, he found not a _real_ gift, but instead a piece of paper that said, ‘ _I wanted to give you a practical gift but didn’t know what you would actually use every day so I’m paying for your next pair of glasses.’_ He smiled when he read the note. “That was actually really thoughtful. Thank you so much, Maria.”

                Maria smiled back. “I was thinking of getting you an ear piercing because you mentioned that you wanted one once, but I didn’t know whether you would actually carry through with it or not.”

                “I don’t know,” Sasha replied as they walked into the aquarium and stood in line to buy tickets. “I don’t know if I actually have the commitment to go through with getting another piercing.”

                “Another?” asked Maria, examining Sasha’s face closely and wondering if he had one and she had just never noticed.

                Sasha blushed. “Actually, just forget that I said anything…”

                “Wait, but do you really-”

                “I don’t like to talk about it.”

                “You know what? I don’t really want to know.” She looked around, trying to find a segue to change the subject. “There are a lot of people here today,” she noted.

                “Yeah,” sighed Sasha. “There are three things that I really dislike about having a December twenty-third birthday; everywhere is really crowded because it’s close to Christmas and people are visiting their families, nobody is ever in town because they’re visiting their families, and it’s too cold to do anything outside.”

                “I _wish_ I was in Poland or Petersburg right now. My husband was going to come visit me, but his flight got cancelled because of the snow.”

                Sasha frowned. “Are you doing anything for Christmas or New Year’s?”

                Maria replied, “I’m spending Christmas helping with charity work at church, but I’m pretty much spending New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day alone. I might go see the fireworks, but that’s all.”

                “You should come to my house,” suggested Sasha. “I mean, it’s not _really_ my house, but my next door neighbor is having a New Year’s Party, and if I’m going to get smashed, then I would rather get smashed with you than with anyone else. You can spend the night at my house.”

                “Wouldn’t that be weird, though? I mean, I would only know you, and I’ve met your boyfriend, but only a couple of times…”

                It always made Sasha happy when someone referred to Leo as his partner or as his boyfriend. “No, no, it won’t be weird,” he insisted. “There are very few things that are weird when everyone’s smashed. You won’t even be the only girl there.”

                “I wasn’t really concerned about that, but it’s good to know, I guess?” Something about Sasha’s concern about girls being there made Maria laugh. “I’ll be there,” she said.

\---

                In the aquarium, there lies a walking tunnel through a 350,000 liter seawater tank, and when Maria and Sasha saw it, they stood by the entrance for a few minutes just marveling at the scope and architecture of the piece. The blue of the tunnel reflected onto all of the people standing and walking inside of it, all marveling at the mere concept that this was what the ocean might have looked like, and all seemingly unaware that the pressure on the cylindrical tunnel was enough to kill them all in an instant. It was just glass and some architectural mathematics that kept the natural boundaries between the two separate worlds as they should have been. In the space of the aquarium, both the sea life and the people who observed them with such curiosity held each other captive in equal but opposite ways. And that was kind of how everything worked; everyone was held in some sort of structural captivity by the circumstances surrounding them, and their course of actions given this structural captivity influenced those of everyone around them in ways that they couldn’t possibly comprehend or even _want_ to comprehend. Just as the tides ebbed and flowed in accordance with the pull of the moon and the sun and the rest of the earth’s waterways, beyond a certain level of sovereignty, nobody had any choice but to act in accordance with those of the billions of people who lived with them and the billions who had lived before.

                It was only after the fact, when the two of them were at the overwhelmingly bourgeois teahouse that Sasha had chosen, that he commented on the immense feelings that the tunnel had given him. “It makes you forget,” Sasha said, “that none of these animals of the sea actually belong here, and that in reality you’re in the middle of the winter in Quebec and you’re not sure if _you_ belong, there, either, and that it’s your twenty-fourth birthday and you have no idea what your place in the world is except that you’re standing in an aquarium in Quebec City surrounded by all of these beings that only belong in that they’re so misplaced from where they’re meant to be in the first place.”

                “You think about this a lot, don’t you?” asked Maria.

                “Some days,” admitted Sasha, “It’s all I think about.”

                “You’re too young to be having a midlife crisis.”

                Sasha smiled weakly. “Even though it’s far below the life expectancy, I _could_ very well die when I’m forty-seven or forty-eight, so I’ve just elected to have a perennial crisis.” Even though he was already relatively soft-spoken, he lowered his voice before speaking again. “Everyone always tells me that I’m so _young_ and that I have so much _time_ to do what I want to do, but I feel like there’s a fine line between that and having to have all of your shit together, and I don’t know where it is.”

                “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but…” Maria didn’t know how to phrase her words without sounding insulting, but she just decided to go ahead and say them anyway. “You just seem that way because you’re… soft. I mean, I think you’ve gotten a lot _less_ soft lately, but you’re still pretty soft.”

                “What do you mean I’m _soft?”_

                “You’re firm when you make decisions or when you want something and you definitely don’t let people walk over you, but you’re kind and tender and cry easily, so nobody wants to hurt your feelings. And you’re not used to people hurting your feelings, either.”

                Sasha accepted most of what Maria said as true, although he objected to one point. “You’re right,” he sighed. “That’s all true.” He reached for the tea pot and poured himself another cup of tea. Between the two of them they had ordered a coconut truffle blend that neither of them had ever had before.

                The conversation lulled for a bit before Maria said, “You know, I’m thinking about visiting the States sometime soon. Maybe this summer.”

                “I’ve never been to the US,” Sasha replied, “and I don’t really plan to go any time soon. Not only because I don’t speak English, but because there’s just too much political unrest and it would be too much work to get a visa. Do you know which part of the country you’re going to visit?”

                “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but my husband has work to do over there this summer, and I’ve always wanted to visit, so I figured that I might as well go.”

                “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you get married when you were so young?”

                Maria didn’t hesitate before she answered, “I was in love and wanted a change of scenery.”

                “That’s it?”

                “That’s it. I mean, it worked, because since then I’ve been dividing my time between being in Poland, Canada, and Russia. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but really, that’s the reason.”

\---

                Sasha came home at six, and by that point, he already felt that he had had a long day. Nevertheless, he did want to spend special quality time with Leo today, and tried to find the energy in himself to do so. When he came home, he found Leo reading and waiting for him in their living room. He walked over to Leo, set his hands on the other man’s shoulders, and asked, “So, what’s the plan?”

                Leo scrutinized Sasha’s face carefully before answering, “I was thinking that if you didn’t look tired then we could go out for dinner, see a theater production, and then get smashed, but if you looked tired then we could go out for dinner, see a theater production, and then just get extra smashed on Christmas Day.”

                “Yeah, I’m down for the latter,” replied Sasha. “When are we going?”

                “Now?”

                “Then let’s _go._ Which show are we seeing? _”_

“One of them.”

                “You’re being terribly ambiguous.”

                “Don’t worry. I know that.”

                And with these words, Leo put on his old black coat, and the two left the apartment together. “I haven’t worn this coat in a really long time,” he commented.

                “What happened to your red one?” asked Sasha.

                “I decided to wear this one because it’s just warmer…” Leo paused as he felt around in the pockets where he had forgotten bits and pieces long ago. In one pocket, he felt a pair of gloves, which he handed to Sasha.

                “Are these the ones that I gave you last October?”

                “They certainly are.” In the other pocket, he felt a round object made of glass, and pulled it out to examine it. He grimaced. It couldn’t have been…

                It had been a long time since he had successfully repressed the memory of the last time that he had been in the apartment that he used to share with Josephine, and while Hippolyte Charles was watching, took a single lightbulb from one of the lamps as some form of petty revenge. It was his last tangible reminder of his relationship with Josephine.

                “What’s that?” asked Sasha glancing over at him. “A lightbulb? Why are you carrying that around?”

                Leo shook his head. “It’s not important,” he said as he handed it to Sasha as well. “Happy Birthday, Sasha.”

                “Aw, thank you, Leo.” He carefully tucked it into his own coat pocket for safekeeping. “I appreciate it.”

                And, as Leo realized the moment he handed it to Sasha, he didn’t care about repressing his memories about Josephine anymore. He didn’t care about the lightbulb anymore or whatever it had meant to him in the first place. He wondered if giving the lightbulb to Sasha was a physical representation of him handing the last of his pain over to Sasha to bear, but life didn’t work that way. Despite what he had once thought, it was a lightbulb, and had never been anything more.

                Yet, as he handed it over to Sasha, he couldn’t help but feel just a little bit lighter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey it's me the author! This fic will probably end up being 25 chapters and I just started working on the twenty-second one so if you've made it this far then STAY TUNED.
> 
> I spend a lot of time writing this that i could spend doing other stuff so if anyone has read this far into the story then i would actually rly appreciate it if anyone commented even if it was just "go back to writing angsty Hamilton fanfiction this fic sux lol"


	18. What a Way to Start the New Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a New Year's Eve party. It doesn't go over well.

When Sasha offhandedly invited Maria to Arthur’s New Year’s party, he didn’t consider who else would be there. In fact, Arthur was generally so frugal that he couldn’t help but think that it was Giuseppina that coerced him to host a New Year’s party in the first place, and that meant that Giuseppina was going to be there. They had made plans to catch up while he and Leo were in Montreal, but with the way that those plans had fallen through, he hadn’t seen her in a long, _long_ time.

                He counted on his fingers the people he knew were going to be there. There was him, Leo, Caroline, Maria, Arthur, Giuseppina, probably Antoine (was he still relevant?) and some other people Sasha didn’t know yet, probably someone else he was forgetting… who was it? There was definitely someone else in his social circle, but despite all of his thinking, he couldn’t remember for the life of him whom it was. Until it hit him.

                When Sasha had thought to himself on that night three months ago that he might never see Klemens again, he had completely neglected to remember the fact that they had all of the same friends, and that they would _have_ to see each other again whether they liked it or not. And for a moment, he considered just not going, before he remembered that he had an obligation to Maria and that even if he didn’t go, the walls were so thin and let so much sound pass through that even if he didn’t go, he would practically be there anyway. Still, though, some small part of him hoped that he fell ill in the next five days so that he would have a good excuse to not go.

                It was the day after Christmas, and because Sasha had been smart about getting smashed, he had managed to narrowly avoid getting a hangover. Leo, however, was an amateur at drinking, got wasted off of some embarrassingly small amount of alcohol, and woke up with a terrible hangover the next day. Sasha didn’t even know whether Caroline was in the apartment or not, but her door was locked and he was pretty sure that she had gotten wasted, too, despite Leo’s futile attempts at being a responsible pseudo-guardian.

                When Sasha woke up, he saw the unusual sight of Leo still passed out next to him, and thought, ‘ _He’s so cute when he’s asleep,’_ got up, and vaguely considered making breakfast for the household but instead decided to just eat cereal instead. It was about five minutes before he heard Leo get up as well, and another five minutes before he came into the kitchen dressed for the day ahead of him.

                “You know, you get ready _really_ fast,” commented Sasha. “Don’t you have a hangover? You got wasted yesterday.” Yesterday was the first time that Sasha had actually seen Leo drunk, but to his disappointment, he acted pretty much the same way that he normally did.

                “I’m didn’t drink that much,” said Leo, “so I don’t really feel that hungover. I don’t really to begin with, and my alcohol tolerance is pretty low, so I get drunk really easily and don’t really have any negative side effects.” Although he did drink wine three or four times every week, he mixed it with water to the extent that it barely counted as wine anymore, so he didn’t really think that it counted.

                That was the first time that Sasha had ever heard a man say that he had a low alcohol tolerance, and for whatever reason, he found it endearing. Even though almost everyone was small relative to Sasha, Leo was just a small person in general, and as a consequence, Sasha found the most arbitrary things that he did to be cute and endearing. He was glad that he was dating someone who wasn’t obsessed with societal pseudo-standards of masculinity was just content with carrying himself well.

                “I don’t want to go to work today,” sighed Sasha. “I say that every single day that I have to go to work, but I just never want to go to work.”

                “You’ve been saying that you want to quit your job every single day for the past eight months, so why don’t you actually just find a new job?”

                “I don’t have any marketable skills and I’m pretty good at my job because I’ve been working there for so long that I get paid considerably more and more flexible hours than I would anywhere else at this point.”

                Every time that Sasha complained about his job, which was pretty often, Leo had to keep in mind that the two of them had grown up in two completely different environments and that Sasha could not possibly understand how privileged he was. Leo had never told Sasha that he had grown up extremely poor, and he supposed that it wasn’t a particularly important detail at this point, but because he had once struggled to even feed himself, he acknowledged very few of Sasha’s problems as legitimate issues. While he _did_ care about the other man’s more recent emotional struggles, when it came to things such as Sasha’s wanting to quit his job, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t bring himself to care. And because he didn’t want to hurt Sasha’s feelings, he couldn’t bring himself to tell him how little he cared, either.

\---

                It was only seven on New Year’s Eve that Maria came to Leo and Sasha’s apartment to have dinner and generally just hang out before going to Arthur’s apartment later that evening. She had been here several times, but the last time that she had actually spent a considerable amount of time here eight months ago when Sasha had been sick. Usually when they spent time together, they either went out or to Maria’s apartment because she was the only one who lived there.

                Since the last time she had been here, the place had changed a lot, although she didn’t think that anyone who lived here was consciously aware of the fact. Not only did it bear the marks of a third person, but it actually looked lived-in; there were books taken off of the shelves and lying haphazardly around; there were some boxes of tea piled on the counter when the tea drawer was no longer enough to hold all of them; one of the Renoir paintings was crooked, but nobody who actually lived here ever looked at them and clearly didn’t notice. She smiled. It was always nice to be here.

                “Hey, Caroline,” Leo said when he saw her before immediately shaking his head. “I meant Maria! I swear that I know your name, I don’t know why I called you my sister’s name.”

                Caroline, who happened to be in the room, shrugged. “I mean, we kind of look alike,” she addressed both Leo and Maria. “I mean, Maria has long dark hair, and I have long dark hair, and we’re both… women…” She paused. “And my real name is Maria!”

                “Oh, I didn’t know that,” replied Maria, “but I’ve only met you a few times.”

                “My full name is _Maria Annunziata_ _Carolina Buonaparte_. But that’s a mouthful, so it’s really just Caroline.”

                Maria changed the subject kind of but not really. “I’ve always thought that _fenestra_ and _ventana_ would make beautiful names.”

                “What, _window_ in Latin and Spanish?”

                She smiled. “If they didn’t have the meanings attached to them, wouldn’t they be wonderful names? Better than _Maria_ , certainly.”

                “Do you speak English, Maria?”

                “Not as well as I speak French, but I could definitely call myself an English speaker.”

                “Well…” Caroline had to stifle her laughs before she could articulate her words properly. “I’ve thought about this a lot and I think that _Rosacea_ , _Pneumonia_ , _Malaria,_ and _Chlamydia_ would all be pretty names for girls. I like _Meningitis_ for a boy.”

                Maria laughed as well. “Dear lord, that is awful…”

                Sasha added his input into the conversation. “If I had a daughter and if it were socially acceptable,” he said, “I would name her _Ryazhenka_.”

                “Baked milk?” asked Maria. “ _That_ ryazhenka?”

                “They could call her Ryasha for short,” Sasha added, referencing the Russian custom of using diminutive names. “No, that sounds horrible. Rasha, maybe, but that sounds too much like _Russia_ … Rayenka?”

                “I have a better idea, Sasha,” Leo interjected from across the room. “ _Don’t name our daughter after baked milk_.” Once again, this elicited a laugh from everyone else in the room. Neither Maria nor Caroline seemed to notice, but Sasha thought to himself, ‘ _Wait, did Leo just say_ our daughter?’ It made him feel good inside.

                They continued to be frivolous for about another half hour until they had dinner and eventually went to Arthur’s apartment. By this point, Sasha had totally forgotten about Klemens, and felt genuinely good about himself for the first time in a _long_ time.

\---

                Klemens made eye contact with Sasha. He knew that Sasha registered the fact that the two of them had made eye contact, but he didn’t want to directly approach him because he feared that something about him would emotionally harm the other man again. Although he didn’t think that there was any real bad blood between them from the last time that they had spoken, he couldn’t be too sure. He watched as Sasha stood and introduced Maria to some people and generally just stood and listened to all of the background noise.

                What had he done in the past three months? It wasn’t as though he didn’t do _anything_ ; in fact they were three of the most productive months of his life. He did a few things that some might have considered to be exciting, but they were so sparsely spread out and had so failed to have any real effect on him as a person that they aren’t worth mentioning. But now he was here, and missing Sasha was the only thing he did in the past three months that bears any sort of relevance to this narrative.

                ‘ _Arthur is really terrible at choosing music for parties,’_ he thought. ‘ _Seriously, does he own nothing but Stravinsky and Mozart CDs? It’s nice, but I’m sure that I’m not alone in the opinion that if I get wasted, I don’t want it to be to the tune of Le Nozze di Figaro… Though Figaro_ is _an excellent play_.” He stood for a while until he finally struck up a half-hearted conversation with one of Arthur’s other friends about the fermentation process of vodka, or something, or another… whatever it was about, he wasn’t really paying attention. He only paid attention to the fact that Sasha seemed to conspicuously avoid him as much as possible, and that, if anything, he kind of deserved it. He focused on this fact so much that he almost missed it when Sasha _did_ go out of his way to speak to him.

                “Hey, Klemens,” he finally said when they were standing next to each other. Neither of them looked at each other, but instead watched everyone else in the room. The music changed to something stupid that Klemens couldn’t recognize and didn’t care to, either.

                “Hey, Sasha,” replied Klemens. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

                “I haven’t seen you in months. How’s it going?”

                Klemens shrugged. “You know. Work and everything. Lots of trials and even more paperwork. What about you?”

                “I start college next month and I got a promotion recently, which is nice.”

                “Right, you’re studying literature and French.”

                “Right…” The conversation paused for a few long seconds. Neither of them knew how to say anything more without addressing the elephant in the room, all of the strings and circumstances that encompassed them now. It reminded Sasha of the time that he and Leo had run into Josephine at the bar; he had hated having to witness their overly-polite encounter then, but now that he was in the same situation himself, he hated it even more. Despite everything, he wanted to hold Klemens’s hand and passionately kiss him more than he wanted anything else in that moment, but even then it was nothing more than a far-flung dream in which they could do what they wanted without hurting anyone else.

                After what seemed like an hour, Klemens finally spoke again. “This might not be the right time to say it,” he said, “but I’ve missed you a lot, Sasha. I think about you every day.”

                Sasha turned away from Klemens. “I’ve missed you too, Klemens, but I think it’s best that we don’t…”

                “See each other,” Klemens finished. “I know.”

                “Because we can’t be together.”

                “And that’s what I said over and over when we first…”

                “Yeah.”

                “There’s nothing else to say, is there?”

                Finally looking at Klemens, Sasha said, “There’s so much else to say, Klemens, but we both know that there will never be a right time to say any of it. So effectively, there’s nothing else to say.”

                That was when Klemens remembered that he had something that was actually extremely important to tell Sasha, but if there would never be a right time, then he decided to not say it at all. Later that night and over the course of the next few months, he wondered to himself on and off whether he should have told him, never coming to a real conclusion. He shook his head and changed the subject. “How are Leo and Caroline?” he asked.

                “They’re still Leo and Caroline,” Sasha answered earnestly. “Leo works a lot more lately, though. I think he’s trying to get promoted, although I don’t really know how it works in the physics world. But he doesn’t have a PhD, so it’s a miracle that he got hired in the first place. And Caroline… she’s alright.”

                “Does she have _any_ friends her age?”

                “Josephine’s daughter stayed with her mother in Canada for a while. Caroline hung out with her pretty often. They went to the same school in France, apparently.”

                “Doesn’t that get awkward? If your brother used to date your friend’s mother?”

                “Apparently not,” shrugged Sasha. “She used to have a crush on you, you know?”

                Klemens wasn’t really surprised by this, but he pretended to be. “Who, Caroline?” he asked.

                “Oh, yeah. She thought it was subtle, but every time your name came up, it was always, ‘ _Oh, Klemens? What is he doing? How is he?’_ ”

                “Are you breaching her trust by telling me this?”

                Sasha nodded. “Oh, yeah, definitely,” he said without an ounce of regret. “But I can trust you, right?”

                “Sure,” replied Klemens, slightly uncomfortable, “but I don’t know whether that’s amusing or whether it makes me uncomfortable.”

                “Well,” Sasha pointed out, “you’re young, foreign, handsome, and know how to file taxes without help, so you’re pretty much the complete package.” While this was definitely something that was typical of Sasha to say, Klemens could tell that the words weren’t really coming from _him_. In fact, ever since he had said the thing about there being nothing else to say, everything that he said had just seemed as if he was on autopilot and that his consciousness was somewhere far away from where they were standing in this moment.

                “It’s really the last one that matters, though, isn’t it?”

                “Obviously.” As Sasha said this, Klemens remembered something that Sash had said to him long ago, that all he really wanted was for Klemens to love him. And now, whether Sasha was conscious of it or not, the look on his face said one thing:

                “ _All I have ever wanted from you is for you to love me. And if you can’t even do that much, then you don’t belong in my life anymore.”_

                Klemens wanted to say, “ _But I_ do _love you, I want to be able to love you, but I can’t,”_ but it wasn’t enough. Nothing that he could say or do anymore would ever be enough.

                “Listen,” Sasha said suddenly with a lowered voice, “please just forget everything that I said that one day in September. None of it meant anything.”

                He didn’t try to argue back. “Okay,” he said. Sasha had said so much that there was no way that he could forget all of it no matter how hard he tried to.

                “That’s all I have to say to you.”

                “Okay.”

                “I think I’m going to go home.”

                “Okay.” But before Sasha left, Klemens again told him, “Sasha, if you ever need anything or if you need help with anything then you can come to me, okay?”

                Sasha smiled, albeit weakly. “Okay. Thanks, Klemens. I’ll see you later.”

                Klemens smiled weakly back at him. “Of course. I’ll see you later.” Whatever “later” meant, anyway. For the second time, he watched the man he loved more than anything else leave his life for an indefinitely long period of time, but this time, somehow, it hurt more than the last. Over the next few days, weeks, months, he would be plagued with the constant thought that he could have _said_ something to make all of it worthwhile, but he didn’t. If it wasn’t for his reading in between the lines, the entire interaction would have been more or less meaningless.

                He decided to stay at Arthur’s apartment until midnight, but a reasonable amount of time after Sasha went home, Klemens walked over to Leo in an idle moment and said to him, “Leo, I know you don’t like me, but at some point, ask Sasha if he’s doing okay.”

                Although Leo wanted to get angry at Klemens and ask him why he couldn’t just stay the fuck away from his partner, despite his impulsivity, he knew better than to start a fight with the other man right now and knew that there would be lots of time for fights to be had in the future. He merely nodded in a manner such that Klemens couldn’t actually tell what he was thinking, and said, “I’ll make sure to do that.”

                Leo left almost immediately after that, somewhat worried that he was being an irresponsible guardian for his sister, but ultimately coming to the conclusion that his sister was safe getting wasted in an apartment full of mature, responsible adults that he mostly knew and mostly trusted at least to some extent. While he didn’t _like_ Klemens or Arthur, per se, if there was one positive thing that could be said about them, it was that they were extremely competent and definitely wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Caroline.

                When he entered his own apartment again, with the riff-raff of Arthur’s gathering in the background, he found Sasha alone scrolling through something on the internet on his laptop and drinking vodka.

                “It’s not a lot of fun to drink alone,” Leo said.

                Sasha looked up. “I’m a regular alcoholic,” he replied. “I’m going to drink myself to death. I’m going to quit my job, drop out of school, and get addicted to crack cocaine.”

                “That’s not funny.”

                “I thought that it was pretty funny.”

                “I just wanted to see if you’re doing okay.”

                “I’m doing fine,” sighed Sasha. “You don’t have to worry about me. This is because of Klemens, right?”

                “I mean, yes, because you left right after you talked to him and now you’re drinking yourself to death and looking at… whatever… on the internet. You browse the internet all the time, though, so that’s not really an important detail, but you know what I mean.”

                “Mmm..” Sasha hummed as he quickly closed the window in which he had searched, ‘ _most efficient ways to kill yourself’_. While he himself thought that this had been a gross overreaction to the position he was in and wasn’t planning on following up by actually doing anything to harm himself, he figured that it was just convenient to _know_. “I’m _fine_. There is no reason to worry about me. Everything is definitely all alright. ”

                “Sasha, we both know that that’s a fucking lie, and although I would _like_ it if you talked to me about your problems, it’s your decision, and I just want you to know that I care about you.”

                That was maybe the first time that Sasha had _ever_ heard Leo swear in the two years that they had known each other. “The past four months… they’ve just been hard. That’s it.”

                “I understand…” He paused. “Do you want me to spend time with you?”

                Sasha looked at Leo and shook his head. “I just kind of want to be alone right now.” He knew that he was probably going to start crying the moment that Leo was out of the house. “I’ll be back sooner or later because I can’t just leave Maria forever.”

                “Just tell me if you need anything, okay? I’m going to go talk to Giuseppina, probably.”

                “Okay. Just be back my midnight so that I can kiss you.” As he said this, Sasha realized that perhaps his initial perception had been correct after all; that perhaps Leo and Klemens were similar characters after all. As Leo left, he opened another internet window and googled, “ _do I have depression”._ Just a few months ago, he would have thought it unimaginable, but now, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

                When Leo went back to Arthur’s apartment to chat with Giuseppina, he realized with a sinking feeling that he hadn’t seen Caroline in a while. Perhaps, he thought, Sasha was right and he was being overprotective of her, but then the thought struck him that she would have been the youngest and most vulnerable person here, and that, despite everything, she had really poor self-control around alcohol, and after thinking about it for a few seconds, he decided to look for her just to make sure that she was alright.

                Arthur had a really small apartment, and even with the volume of people around him, it didn’t take very long for him to ascertain that his sister was nowhere in proximity, and if she wasn’t in his apartment, either, then…

                The last time that he could really remember feeling anxiety was two years ago when he had lost his job, and that didn’t even hold a candle to what he felt right now.

                ‘ _I’m a horrible guardian,’_ he thought to himself as he stepped into the hallway as quickly as he possibly could, his heart beating faster and faster. ‘ _I’m a horrible guardian and thought it would be fine because she’s an adult, but I didn’t think carefully enough and… and… oh, dear lord, I haven’t prayed in over a year, but have mercy… well, if Caroline was going anywhere, then she would have texted me, right? Right?’_

                He checked his cell phone to see if he had any calls or texts from his sister, and his heart sank even further (if that was possible) when he saw that he had sixteen texts (all gibberish) and seven missed calls from Caroline. ‘ _This is my fault for never answering the phone. This is my fault, and if anything happened to her, then…”_ No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to forgive himself for allowing his sister to put herself into what seemed like evident physical danger.

                When he called her cell phone, it only took one ring before someone picked up on the other end. ‘ _Oh, thank god.’_ “Caroline?” he asked.

                “Your sister’s safe,” an unfamiliar voice said. It sounded like a man his own age, and although he was still terribly worried, he also felt a small amount of relief at these words. “I found her super drunk on the sidewalk without a coat while I was driving. I _swear_ that nothing really bad has happened. I took her to my apartment to give her blankets and hot tea and called you a bunch of times because you’re her emergency contact. Nothing bad happened.”

                “What’s your name?”

                “Joachim Murat.”

                “How old are you?” It wasn’t really a relevant question, but Leo wanted to know.

                “Thirty-three.”

                “Where are you?”

                Joachim gave the name of his apartment complex, which thankfully wasn’t more than a block or so away. Leo could have walked there and back in the freezing cold with his drunk sister, but because this seemed incredibly dangerous for multiple reasons, he decided to suck up his pride and ask a favor of Joachim.

                “You’ve already done so much for me, but I have to ask you another favor. Will you please… drive her over to my apartment complex?”

                “Of course. It’ll be six minutes with the traffic.”

                “Thank you so much,” Leo said, although it was impossible to sound as grateful as he actually was. “Thank you so, so, so much.”

                “It’s what any person with a conscience would do.”

                Six minutes later, Joachim carefully escorted Caroline into the lobby of Leo’s apartment complex, where Leo had been tensely waiting for the past six minutes. When he saw them, he ran over to Caroline, who clearly didn’t understand what was going on, and hugged her as tightly as possible.

                “Oh, thank you so much, Monsieur Murat,” Leo said again. “I can’t… I could never express how deeply indebted I am to you…” Being deeply indebted had never felt so relieving. “Thank you. Thank you. I think you may have saved my sister’s life.”

                “It’s what anyone would have done.”

                Leo shook his head. “Not anyone. You’re a good man, Monsieur Murat.” He still clutched his sister to him as tightly as possible as if he was worried that she might escape again. He shook hands with Joachim. “Please, if there’s anything that I can do for you, whatsoever, then.”

                Joachim interrupted him, saying again, “It’s what anyone would have done. I’m just glad that I found your sister before anyone else did. It’s dangerous on the streets, you know, on New Year’s.”

                ‘ _This feels like something from a movie.’_ “Say, you should come up to my apartment and have… something. Not an alcoholic beverage. Coffee, maybe?”

                “I really shouldn’t…”

                “You have to.” This was a demand on Leo’s part, but Joachim shook his head again.

                “I really should get home.”

                “Okay,” Leo said, resigned to the fact that there was legitimately nothing that he could do for Joachim right here and right now. He realized that one of the reasons that he felt so vulnerable even now was that, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, he was in a situation that he had absolutely no control over, and the best way to proceed was just to accept it and move on. “Thank you again, Monsieur Murat, for everything.” He paused, and then said again, “You’re a good man,” and he meant it.

                “I’m glad I could help,” Joachim said before he left the building, Leo still standing with Caroline slumped from exhaustion in his arms.

\---

                When he returned to the apartment, he put Caroline to sleep in her bed immediately, and then went to the kitchen to drink some water and think about what had just happened. Sasha wasn’t there anymore, and Leo just assumed that he had either gone to bed or was doing something somewhere. In any case, it was 23:30 and he had to be back by midnight, so it wouldn’t be long before he returned. After the trash can incident, Leo no longer worried about him getting mugged if he went somewhere late at night.

                The last time that Leo had had a night so awful, it was the night that he had found out that Josephine had been cheating on him with Hippolyte Charles. He had come home early from work for some reason or another… he didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t find it in himself to care anymore about something that now seemed so trivial.

                ‘ _The fact that Joachim Murat was a good person was so lucky. The only reason that Caroline isn’t dead right now is because of luck. Dear lord…’_ He thought about it for a few minutes, and before he knew it, began to drift off into a deep sleep.

                When Sasha reentered the apartment at ten minutes before midnight with Maris, he found Caroline asleep in the living room and Leo fast asleep at the kitchen table, still fully dressed with his head resting in his arms.

                “It must have been an uneventful night,” he said to her. “They’re both asleep. Hang on…”

                Maria waited in the living room as Sasha swiftly carried the very unconscious Caroline to her room and to her bed. Sasha knew that if he woke Leo up now, he wouldn’t fall asleep again for the rest of the night, so he didn’t bother to wake him up.

                “The sofa pulls out into a bed,” he explained. “You can sleep there. There’s already sheets and everything, so…”

                “Thanks, Sasha.”

                “It’s no problem,” he replied. Both of them looked at each other in the dim lamplight, both tired and disheveled. He yawned, “I’m so exhausted.”

                “Me too, Sasha.”

                “Do you wanna go on the balcony and watch the fireworks?”

                Maria yawned as well. “That sounds nice.”

                The two of them went on the balcony of Leo and Sasha’s apartment. The air wasn’t still, but instead illuminated by the other celebrations that the people around them were holding that night and filled with sounds of voices, music, and the occasional crash. They watched the occasional car go by beneath them and tried not to shiver in the frigid air of the Canadian winter. There were five minutes left until the new year.

                “You know,” said Maria, “my mother once told me not to go on balconies at night with strange men.”

                “You know,” Sasha said in return, “I’m too tired to think of a witty retort to that. Today’s just been a lot.”

                “Today was the first time that I’ve spent New Year’s eve surrounded by literal strangers. That was a first.”

                “You really hit it off with Antoine, though, didn’t you?”

                “He’s fascinating.”

                “Would you rather be alone on a balcony at night with him?”

                “Was that supposed to be an implication of something?”

                “No. But I see why it might have sounded like that.” He paused for a moment and exhaled deeply. “You know, I’m glad that we can just be friends without having to worry about... stuff. Like a casual friendship. I’m glad that we will never have to worry about anything between us.”

                “I’m glad, too,” Maria sighed. “I would be so alone here without you.”

                “Mmm... I’m happy that we met at the bar that one time.”

                “I’m happy that you’re alive and here with me right now.”

                Silence, or as close as it could get to silence, hung in the air for another minute before a loud noise of celebration broke out from the streets and apartments beneath them and fireworks began to shimmer and burst in the distant sky. Although it was dark and neither could really see each other, Sasha smiled.

                “Happy New Year, Maria.”

                “Happy New Year, Sasha.”

                They went inside almost immediately after that, both too exhausted to entertain the idea of bearing the cold for even a minute longer. After Sasha helped Maria fold out the sofa into a bed, she said, “I’m just going to change clothes and go to sleep.”

                “Okay.”

                “Are you just going to leave your boyfriend in your kitchen, or…?”

                “No, I’ll carry him to sleep, don’t worry. Good night.”

                “Good night.”

                Sasha went to the kitchen, and gently picked Leo up bridal-style to carry him to their bed. However, despite Sasha’s efforts to not wake him up, he groggily said, “…Sasha?”

                “Mmhmm?”

                “Is Caroline asleep?”

                “She’s very unconscious,” Sasha reassured him, somewhat wondering why he seemed to concerned for Caroline.

                “Oh… good…” As Sasha opened the door to their bedroom, he asked another question. “Is it 2017 yet?”

                “It’s 2017.” Sasha replied as he set Leo down on their bed.

                “Oh… good…” Stretching out his arms, he blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes. He stood up, made the few steps to their dresser, pulled out a pair of pajamas, and began to undress immediately. In about a minute, he went over to their bed and lied down again. In about another minute, Sasha turned off the lights and joined him. Sasha could feel Leo’s warm skin on his own, and listened to the gentle sound of him breathing.

                “Leo…” he whispered.

                “Yeah?”

                Sasha didn’t know what he was going to say, but the words came out of him before he knew what he was saying. “Leo, do you want… do you want to get married?”  It wasn’t until the next day that he realized the magnitude of his words, so now, he didn’t think about them very thoroughly as they hung in the air between them.

                Leo didn’t hesitate a moment before slowly mumbling back, “Sasha, we’re already married.”

                “Oh…” He felt that Leo was trying to say something profound, but either for a lack of words or energy hadn’t gotten his point across all the way. ‘ _What does Leo mean that we’re already married?’_ he wondered. ‘ _We’re literally not.’_ He decided that finally, it was time to actually go to sleep and just talk to Leo about it tomorrow.

                “Good night, Leo,” he said.

                “Good night, Sasha. Good night.”

                They had all the time in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uHHHHHH if you enjoyed this or even if you didn't I would appreciate it if you COMMENTEd because it gives me more motivation to write than I can provide myself with


	19. Warmest Regards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha smiled. ‘Prospective fiancé,’ he thought. ‘Because that’s a thing now, apparently.’ 
> 
> OR
> 
> In which Arthur Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne.

                When it came February, Sasha had gotten into a few regular habits of the new year. First of all, he made it a point to always go to his classes, always study, and always do the reading no matter how badly he didn’t want to. When he had graduated from secondary school, he had never planned to go to school _ever_ again, but now that he was actually in college, despite the fact that he was older than almost all of his peers, it was an enjoyable experience. In any case, he liked having something to _do_ and to think about because it kept him overthinking and becoming intensely depressed, which happened somewhat often although he kept it very well-hidden from everyone around him.

                Secondly, he decided to start writing for several reasons. Because he was in college, he had to learn to write research papers and scholarly essays again, an art that he had lost over the years of not writing research papers and scholarly essays. However, what he had somehow failed to consider in the months leading up to his starting school was that he had only ever gone to school and written papers in Russian, and because of this, writing formally in French and using a corresponding essay format was far more difficult than he thought it would be. He regularly had to enlist Caroline’s help in reading over anything he had written for school, and more often than not, she told him that rewriting the paper would save more time than trying to salvage what he already had. In addition to this, he took up creative writing because he thought that it would help improve his writing skills (it did), and because writing had always been a thing which he wanted to do but always made excuses to avoid. Now, there were no more excuses.

                Finally, he got into the routine of asking Leo to marry him fairly often; once or twice a week, when they were alone, he would ask Leo, “Leo, will you marry me?”

                To which Leo would always reply, without fail, “Sasha, we’re already married.” Sasha never quite understood what he was trying to say, so he asked again, hoping to get another answer.

                Nope. Just “Sasha, we’re already married” every time.

                One night at the very beginning of February, when Caroline was out of the house (Leo had forbidden her from drinking in general and being outside of the house late at night if she wasn’t directly accompanied by someone he knew and trusted), Sasha decided to ask him over dinner again.

                “Leo,” he said, “will you marry me?”

                “Sasha, we’re already married.”

                “Listen,” sighed Sasha, finally resigning himself to the fact that Leo was never going to change his response. “Whenever I ask you if you’ll marry me, you always say the same thing. You always say, ‘ _Sasha, we’re already married,’_ but I legitimately don’t understand what you mean or what you’re trying to say.”

                Leo’s eyes widened slightly as reality shook him awake and he realized that all this time, Sasha was being completely serious when he asked him to marry him. “My god,” he answered, “I didn’t realize that you were actually being serious.”

                “Yes! I’ve been serious this whole time, I just don’t know what you mean by…” He took a sip of water.

                Leo didn’t know what to say other than that his lack of understanding was really embarrassing. “That’s really embarrassing on my part,” he said, and then paused for a moment while he tried to think of something to say to Sasha. “You really want to marry me?”

                “Yes. I do.”

                “But we’re already…”

                “Married?”

                “Yes. I mean, think about it. We already live together and do everything together. I don’t think of things as _your_ things and _my_ things anymore, but as _our_ things. There’s a certain amount of togetherness in our lives that can’t be undone at this point.”

                “But will you marry me?”

                “You really put me on the spot here, and I need some time to think about it. I mean…” Leo tried to think of how to phrase his words properly. “This is your first serious relationship, and every time that I’ve been with anyone before, it’s never ended well. And we’ve only been together for a year, and there’s a _lot_ of things that need to be discussed before we get formally engaged that could potentially be deal-breakers. Like have we ever formally discussed politics? Or finances? Or what we want to do with the rest of our lives in a pragmatic fashion?”

                “I mean, I’m pretty apolitical and don’t talk about politics that much, but in the 2012 elections I voted for…”

                “I said there were important discussions to have. I didn’t say we had to start right _now.”_

                “You’re right, you’re right,” admitted Sasha, “we can start having real serious discussions… tomorrow.”

                “Tomorrow sounds good. And you haven’t met the rest of my family yet, either.”

                “So, this is kind of unrelated, but am I actually invited to your sister’s wedding in April?”

                Leo smiled. “Yes, of course you’re _invited_. You’re my… prospective fiancé, I suppose.”

                Sasha smiled as well. ‘ _Prospective fiancé_ ,’ he repeated in his mind. ‘ _That’s a thing now, apparently.’_ “And you can meet my family never.”

                “Sounds good. Also, let’s not tell anyone that we’re prospectively engaged.”

                “So our relationship will be exactly like before, but just a bit more serious.”

                Leo nodded. “Whatever happens happens.”

\---

                After that conversation, not much changed between Leo and Sasha other than that they made a list titled, “ _Important Conversations to Have”_ and tried to cross off a few things off the list every now ant then. It was a non-exhaustive list of every single topic that either of them had any opinions on whatsoever, ranging from serious topics such as “CHILDREN” and “POTENTIAL CANADIAN CITIZENSHIP” to informal ones such as “LEO NEEDS TO EITHER TAKE HANDWRITING LESSONS OR START TYPING EVERYTHING” and “RUSSIAN COOKING”. They discussed one serious issue and one less serious issue twice a week, starting with “WHAT BOTH OF US CONSIDER OFFENSIVE” and “SASHA GOING TO COLLEGE”. They went down the list, occasionally adding new things and taking out things that didn’t seem relevant anymore.

                Sasha was already well aware that he didn’t like discussing the future in general, but he soon found out that he _especially_ didn’t like discussing it with Leo. He wanted to live in the _now_ with him forever, but the idea of spending their lives together scared him, and not in a good way. Perhaps it was because their relationship was fairly casual, but every time he tried to imagine a future with Leo, something within him prevented him from doing so. He began to feel that this had been a mistake, and that he hadn’t thought through things carefully enough, but the fact of the matter was that he had thought through things _very_ carefully and couldn’t help feeling this way, anyway.

\---

                About a week after Leo and Sasha became prospectively engaged, Sasha and Arthur went to the library together to work on their respective projects. It had been a while since Sasha had last been here, because he had exhausted the entire Russian language section, small as it was, and then had no reason to go anymore because he preferred to buy his own books whenever he could.

                They went into one of the private walled-in rooms to study, but as it soon became evident, neither of them really _wanted_ to study or do work. They were really just there to hang out as friends. Arthur, however, found it slightly uncomfortable to have Sasha as a friend. He didn’t really want Sasha as a friend, and thought that they were better off as but neighbors and friendly acquaintances. A lot of this, he knew, stemmed from the fact that he was still good friends with Klemens, but he also knew that a lot of it stemmed from the fact that he didn’t think that Sasha was particularly trustworthy; one might even have called him insincere. He was in the awkward situation in which he knew more about Sasha than Sasha knew he knew about him, and because of this, oftentimes, he didn’t know what to say to him without sounding confrontational.

                If there was a word to describe Arthur, however, it was confrontational.

                Yet, despite his not wanting to be close to Sasha, Arthur knew that there was something that just made people fall in love with him, and he desperately wanted to know what it was. So far, in his time knowing Sasha, he had failed to see it. What was there about Sasha that was worth falling in love with?

                In an attempt to at least try to make some pleasant conversation with the Russian, he asked Sasha, “So is it true what they say about French guys?”

                Sasha looked up from his highlighted notes at Arthur, and after a few seconds, responded, “What,” in an incredibly monotonous and unenthusiastic tone.

                Arthur let Sasha’s “ _What”_ hang in the air for a moment before he said, “…Is it true that they don’t like milk?”

                It took a moment for the question to fully register with Sasha, but he could tell that he was trying very, very hard to not smile at his joke just a little bit. “I mean… yes, I suppose so. I live with a French guy who doesn’t like milk.”

                “You thought I was going to say something nasty, didn’t you?”

                “What else are you supposed to expect when someone asks you ‘ _Is it true what they say about French guys’_? That has such a sexual connotation!”

                “So is it true what they say about Russian guys?”

                “What?”

                “That they don’t know how to take a joke?”

                Sasha looked back at his notes, and began to nonchalantly flip through them. “Only if it’s true what they say about Irishmen.”

                “And what would that be?”

                “That they all need to take a lesson in shutting the fuck up.”

                Arthur didn’t know that Sasha had it in him to be rude, and he was so surprised by this that he duly shut the fuck up. Although he tried to focus on the Very Important report that he was supposed to be writing, he found that he just _couldn’t_ , despite his _best_ efforts, and just kept on staring at Sasha and trying to figure him out. He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was staring, and after about thirty seconds, it became glaringly obvious to Sasha that Arthur was up to something, although he had no idea what it could be.

                It wasn’t long after that that Sasha closed his eyes, looked directly at Arthur, and said clearly and plainly, “Arthur, what’s your problem?”

                “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Arthur understood perfectly well what Sasha was trying to call him out on.

                “You just keep on staring at me. Do I have pen on my face or something?”

                “You don’t have pen on your face.”

                “I don’t know what your deal is, but you’ve been acting really strange and condescending for all of today, and you’re usually extremely condescending, but it’s been even more so.” He paused. “Do we have an issue? Some sort of unresolved beef that I’m unaware of? Because if there is, I would really like to know.”

                Arthur briefly wondered who would win if he and Sasha got into a fistfight. Probably Sasha. He decided that at this point, anything he said would either hurt Sasha’s feelings or escalate the tension between them and because he didn’t want Sasha to hate him, he eventually just decided to hurt Sasha’s feelings.

                In the heat of the moment, he said, “I don’t like your boyfriend.” And, because he was already on a roll making decisions without thinking about them thoroughly enough, followed his original statement up by saying, “I think you need a new one.”

                “Are you just… are you just quoting that Avril Lavigne song or are you being serious?”

                “Both.”

                “Oh… okay. Why do you think that?”

                ‘ _This is a weird situation that I never asked to be a part of.’_  “I don’t think that you belong together, and I think that getting engaged would be a really bad idea.”

                “Why do you think that?” Sasha asked again, and Arthur was actually shocked that he was taking this so well.

                “This is going to sound harsh, but your boyfriend is a narcissistic workaholic who only pretends to care about most of your problems and you’re an emotionally unstable, noncommittal twenty-something who doesn’t have any real plans for life who is probably going to be on the high road to alcoholism in a year or two at this rate. And you both have terrible communication skills. It’s not going to work out.”

                Sasha looked at the ground. He wanted to hate Arthur for throwing hard insults, but he had actually just done a pretty impressive job at efficiently pointing out all of his and Leo’s flaws. He was thinking about a lot of things, both about Arthur and what he had said. He had no doubt in his mind now that Arthur was absolutely an asshole, but at the same time, it was evident that he actually cared for the well-being of the people around him. Really, the only asshole-ish thing about him was the brashness of the way that he spoke to others, and because he was generally an intelligent guy who understood the implications and consequences of the things that he said and did, there was no way that he wasn’t aware of this.

                And, truth be told, Sasha had some similar thoughts on his mind. He _did_ want to be with Leo and he had no doubts about loving him, but as of late, his emotional state had been all over the place, and uncertainties continued to pile in his mind- potential engagement being one of them.

                He hid it well enough, and if anything, he seemed to be doing _better_ lately than he ever had been before- he was more productive, smiled and laughed more, had a more positive air about him than ever- but all of these things seemed fake once he was alone and allowed himself to think about all of the negativities plaguing him. The only thing that seemed certain anymore was that one day, and probably soon, he was going to crash and burn and it wouldn’t be elegant. He knew well by this point that he had been suffering from depression, but he didn’t realize that it wasn’t one of those things that would go away if he tried to ignore it hard enough.

                “Arthur,” he said, “You think I don’t already know that?”

\---

                That day, like many other days, Caroline was bored out of her mind at work. While Sasha always worked in the mornings when people actually came in to keep the place busy, her shift always fell in the afternoon when everyone who might have thought about going there was either at work or at school, and as a result, she passed the time either by cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned or staring out of the window. Sometimes she chatted with Antoine Jean-Gros when he came in, and while she maintained the ruse that she and her brother weren’t related, it wasn’t particularly interesting anymore. It was just a fact of life. It was times like this when she was forced to remind herself that she was literally selling her hours for minimum wage, that she had very little else to do, anyway, and that at least this was something that she could put on her CV in the years to come.

                When it was high noon, however, and more people began to come in for lunch and whatnot, things were generally better. One of the first people who walked into the store today was a tall, flamboyantly-dressed man whom she _knew_ she had never met, but that, despite the illogicality of it, she felt that she vaguely recognized. From where, she had no way of telling.

                “Hello,” she said to him. They awkwardly stared at each other for another few seconds. Caroline could definitely not tell who this man was, but the way that his eyes flickered in recognition made it evident that they _had_ met before.

                “Caroline Buonaparte?” he asked. The last time that he had seen her, she had been totally and utterly wasted, so she looked different enough that he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it was the same girl.

                “I’m sorry, have we met before?” asked Caroline.

                “It’s a long story, but I suppose not, not really…” he answered, “but I’ve met your brother. My name is Joachim Murat, by the way.”

                “Oh, so you’re friends with Leo.” Caroline carefully examined Joachim once again, and thought to herself, ‘ _Leo doesn’t have very many friends, but from what I’ve seen I can positively say that all of his friends are gay.’_ “Do you want me to tell him that I ran into you today?”

                “Well, I wouldn’t say that we’re _friends_ , per se, but I would appreciate it if you told him that I send my regards.”

                She had never met anyone who had been the type of person to send regards before, let alone being the messenger of the regards themselves. Deciding that she liked Joachim, she said, “Of course I’ll do that. So… coffee?”

                When Leo returned home that night, Sasha was still out grocery shopping, and the moment that Caroline heard her brother unlock the door, she remembered that she was supposed to give him Joachim’s regards.

                “ _Hey,”_ she called from the sofa in living room area, which was adjacent to the doorway. “ _Napolone_.”

                Leo, was hanging his coat up on the back of the door, looked over at Caroline. “What, no _hello_? Or _how are you doing?_ Just _Hey, Napoleone?”_

                “Oh, I’m sorry. How are you doing?”

                He shook his head. “No, I was just being sarcastic.” It had been six months and Caroline didn’t understand his sense of humor any better than when she came here in the first place. “What’s up?” he asked.

                “Do you know a guy named Joachim Murat?”

                “My god, how do you know Joachim?” He leaned on the back of the door.

                “Wait, am I not supposed to know him? How do _you_ know him?” Caroline thought that this entire thing was weird.

                “Well, it’s a long story…”

                “That’s what he said, too.”

                “…but long story short, he saved your life.”

                “ _My_ life?” she said in disbelief. “How could he possibly have saved my life? I just met him today. But…” It would have made sense why Caroline felt that she vaguely recognized him, but it sent a wave of panic throughout her system that there was some point in which her life had been in serious danger that she didn’t even know of or remember.

                For the past month, Leo had neglected to tell Caroline about the time what she had almost died, but it now occurred to him that perhaps he should have done so a long time ago. ‘ _Caroline’s going to be really mad at me that I didn’t tell her about this until now,’_ he thought, but alas, there was nothing he could do about it at this point. “You remember Arthur’s New Year’s Party?” he asked.

                Caroline had to take a moment to think about it. “Well, now that you mention it, I don’t really remember it at all. I remember thinking that I wanted to go home, to France, and thinking that it would be a good idea to try to walk there…”

                “You got blackout drunk, probably made good on your idea to try to walk there, and went outside in the freezing cold without a coat on. Joachim saw you outside on the sidewalk, took you to his apartment, gave you tea and hot blankets, and called me like fourteen times. I think that that was the most panicked I had been in my entire life.”

                “And you’re telling me this _now_?” Leo had been right; Caroline’s previously confused expression quickly shifted into one of anger. “If my life was legitimately in danger, you should have told me, I don’t know, the day after? Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

                “There never seemed to be a right time to tell you about it.”

                “What about when you told me that I wasn’t allowed to drink or leave the apartment at night and didn’t provide any reason? Does Sasha know about this?”

                “Of course he doesn’t. Before today, Joachim and I were the only ones who knew what happened.”

                Caroline angrily sighed and rolled her eyes. “I didn’t think I would ever have to tell _you_ this, Leo, but I cannot _believe_ how irresponsible that was, not telling me.”

                “Well, what’s done is done. What do you want me to do about it _now?”_

                “I want to know… would you have acted differently had it been Hortense? And not me?” she asked. Hortense was the name of Josephine’s daughter to whom Leo had been essentially a father figure from when she was eleven to when she was eighteen. Hortense was also one of Caroline’s best friends. The combination of these two things made this question horribly painful for Leo to answer.

                It took him a moment to think about it. “What do you _want_ me to answer, Caroline?”

                “I don’t have anything that I want you to answer. I just want to know if you would have treated the situation differently if it had been Hortense and Josephine instead of me and Sasha.”

                “And what, exactly, are you trying to accuse me of?”

                “I don’t know,” answered Caroline. “Just… think about it, okay?” After feeling that she had sufficiently made Leo feel bad (Leo _never_ felt bad about anything he did, but she didn’t know that), she walked towards her bedroom door. As she rested her hand on the doorknob, about to open it, however, she looked at Leo and said, “By the way, I really would like an apology. And Joachim told me to tell you that he sends his regards, but I really don’t think you deserve them right now.” She didn’t come out of her room for the rest of the night, not even to eat dinner, and as he often did when she was in a bad mood, Leo decided to just leave Caroline alone and think of the right thing to say to her so that she didn’t harbor any negative feelings against him.

                Dinner that night was surprisingly lonely between him and Sasha, and whatever conversation either of them tried to make, it ended up falling through because they were on two totally different pages throughout the duration of the meal. Finally, after staring at the tablecloth in silence for a few minutes, Leo said, “Sasha, there’s something I have to tell you that I’ve been thinking about.”

                “I have something to tell you too.”

                “Bad news?”

                Leo nodded. “And yours?”

                Sasha nodded as well. “Bad news,” he affirmed. “Let’s just say it at the same time to get it over with. On the count of three.”

                On the count of three, Leo said, “I think we should wait to think about getting engaged…” and although he didn’t hear all of what Sasha said, he _did_ hear, “don’t want to get engaged.”

                “Oh,” said Sasha, “so we’re on the same page.” They were on _completely_ different pages, but both came to the same conclusion anyway.

                “Do you want to talk about it?” Leo asked. “I mean, I want to break off whatever it was that we had because… there’s no reason to rush into things, you know? We have so much time to do… whatever.” Even as he said this, it was evident that wasn’t what he was actually thinking about at all.

                “I agree, absolutely.” And this statement, too, had a certain air of insincerity that Leo could have detected from kilometers away but didn’t bother to call Sasha out on. “So, that was a thing.”

                “That was certainly a thing,” repeated Leo. ‘ _Ex-fiancé number three.’_

\---

                Later that night, when Leo finally figured out what he wanted to say to Caroline, he softly knocked on her door until she opened it. Sasha, who had classes early in the morning, had already gone to sleep. After a few seconds, Caroline opened the door.

                “Leo,” she said in a mere acknowledgement of the fact that he was there.

                “Can I come in?”

                “Yeah, of course.”

                Leo came into Caroline’s room and sat at the chair at her desk as she sat on her bed. Leo didn’t come in here often, but she didn’t seem to have changed much since she had moved here in the first place. All of the blue and green decorations that Leo and Sasha (mostly Sasha) had chosen were still in their places, and if not for the objects that functioned as necessities of life (such as Caroline’s books and her small horde of blankets), he wouldn’t have been able to tell that anything had changed. The only decorations that she had bothered to put up were a framed polaroid that he didn’t examine too closely and a few postcards from various art museums that she had visited.

                Leo looked away from the postcards and at Caroline. “So,” he said solemnly, “I thought about what you said, and you’re right.” He paused dramatically. “I wouldn’t have acted the same way that I did had it been Hortense. But that’s because I essentially raised her, and in the entire time we’ve been close, you’ve always been my adult sister. I think that sometimes because you’re the same age as Hortense and because I’m your guardian I try to act like I’m your parent, but as you and Sasha keep on reminding me, I’m not. I’m your brother. I know what it’s like to care about someone like a father, and that’s definitely not how I feel about you. You’re my younger sister, and I care about you like you’re my younger sister. And that’s something I’m not used to.”

                “I’m still kind of mad at you,” stated Caroline after listening to what Leo had to say, “but I forgive you for not knowing what to do in the situation you were placed in.”

                “I didn’t ask for forgiveness,” Leo pointed out. “Let’s just make that clear that I never apologized.”

                “You’re making it worse.”

                “I know.”

                “Just take the forgiveness and get out before I change my mind.”

                Leo stood up and pushed the chair into the desk. “Goodnight, Caroline,” he said as he left the room.

                “Goodnight.”

                Because he wasn’t tired yet, Leo went to the living room area, the place where everything seemed to happen, and picked up Sasha’s journal that was sitting on the table. While Sasha normally preferred a certain level of privacy, he felt comfortable just leaving his journal around because it was written in Russian cursive, which nobody else could have had the slightest success in reading even if they tried. Leo sometimes wondered what Sasha sounded like when he spoke Russian; of course, Sasha would have spoken it for him if he asked, but even if he tried to learn it he would be so late in the game that he would never be able to understand the true meaning of whatever he was saying. Leo picked up the journal and thumbed through the pages, not understanding a single word or phrase that was written, but just looking at the smooth meanders of his partner’s handwriting.

                He didn’t know why, or what had happened to instigate this change, but he felt in that moment that he was more out of touch with Sasha than ever, even more than when they had been strangers whose only connection was that they worked together. Every time they discussed the uncertainties of whatever future awaited them, there only seemed to be more, and Leo remembered that when they had first started seeing each other, he had vowed that he would one day be the first person to break Sasha’s heart. Sasha’s heart had been broken so many times and Leo had fallen so deeply in love with him that Leo didn’t know what he was to do anymore. When he finally set the journal down and looked at the clock, he looked at the clock and saw that it was almost midnight. He wondered for the first time if it was a mistake to fall in love with Sasha in the first place, but if it was, then it was too late in the game for both of them to spare any pain.

                And Leo didn’t know whether this was the beginning of the end or whether the end had begun long ago and the symptoms were just beginning to show. In any case, whatever was going to happen had already started, and there was no way around it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been writing like a MADMAN bc i have to finish all twenty-five chapters by the sixth of June AAAAAAAAAAAA
> 
> please comment because literally NOTHING makes me happier than when someone comments


	20. uhhhhHHHHHH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I've been a jerk to you for five minutes?” repeated Sasha incredulously. He had always carried a certain level of disdain for grown men who picked fights with teenage girls, but here he was, a grown man, picking a fight with a teenage girl. Wonderful. “Completely ignoring the past nine months in which I have never once said a mean word to you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we made it to CHAPter 20 fam

                Arthur woke up to the sound of the Overture of Mozart’s _Le Nozze di Figaro_ , the song that he had faithfully used for his morning alarm for years, and loudly said the word, “ _Fuck!”_ as was his morning tradition. Usually he said “ _Fuck_!” right when he woke up because he had some engagement that he hadn’t been looking forward to, because it was an integral part of his morning routine, or because he had woken up in the middle of some dream that he had particularly wanted to finish, but couldn’t because he was already wide awake at this point. Today was one of the latter.

                It was embarrassing, it really was, and Arthur actually thought he would rather die than tell anyone about it. Especially Klemens. If Klemens ever found out, he was _never_ going to hear the end of it.

                The thing that was so humiliating that Arthur couldn’t even bear to admit it to himself was that, quite recently, he had begun to nurse a small crush on his next-door neighbor. He had begun to nurse a small crush on Sasha. The first time he had had an erotic dream about him, he had brushed it off as strange but _whatever_ , but now that it had happened again he couldn’t ignore it anymore.

                ‘ _Why?’_ he asked himself over and over again. ‘ _Why him? And why me? Why does everyone fall in love with him? He’s not that great… and it doesn’t even make sense… I’m too old for this… I don’t even really like him… I really just want to have sex with him… but I have a girlfriend… oh, shit, I have a girlfriend, what am I supposed to do?’_

                Two things occurred to Arthur at the same time. The first was that he was definitely less heterosexual than he had initially thought. The second was that he _had_ to break up with Giuseppina. Right now. Immediately.

                The moment he realized this, he unplugged his cell phone from where it was charging near his bed, and, trying to think of the best thing to say, texted Giuseppina, “ _Can I come over this weekend?”_

                Almost immediately, she texted back, “ _just let me know when!! also, it’s 6 in the morning on a so go the fuck 2 sleep”._

\---

                It was only later in the day that, like most days, Arthur ran into Sasha as he left his apartment. He didn’t know how they always managed to leave the house at the same time, given their drastically different schedules, but somehow it always happened. Sometimes it happened in the morning; sometimes it happened in the afternoon; sometimes, like tonight, it happened at night.

                “Oh, hey, Arthur,” Sasha said as he left his apartment and locked the door from the outside. This wasn’t entirely necessary, as both Leo and Caroline were in the apartment, but neither of them would remember to lock the door once he was already gone. “Weird that this happens every day, more or less.” He looked at Arthur, who normally looked fine, but had clearly gone out of his way to dress _really_ nicely and groom himself _extremely_ well. Moreover, Arthur was normally so frugal (his apartment furniture was a joke and his bed was literally a mattress on the floor) that Sasha didn’t realize he had it within him to care about something so scandalously _frivolous_ as style. “You look really good,” he added.

                “Oh, thanks,” said Arthur casually as he finished pulling his key out of the lock and the two went down the hallway to the stairs. “Where are you headed?”

                “I’m just going to go buy milk from the grocery store down the corner. Caroline went to the supermarket and bought the groceries earlier today, but you know… the French.” He paused, and then asked, “Where are you off to?”

                “You know, out.” The two descended the staircase.

                “Do you not want to tell me? Are you going on a date?” While he normally would avoid asking personal questions, Sasha felt as if he knew Arthur well enough to goad him about where he was going.

                Arthur blushed very slightly, but Sasha didn’t notice. “Sort of. I don’t think it’s really a date.”

                “How so?” Because Arthur had always seemed very morally upright to Sasha, Sasha just assumed that he had already broken up with Giuseppina and that he had somehow just never heard about it.

                “Do you really want to know?”

                “You sound like you’re off to commit a murder or something, but because you’re being so vague and secretive, I kind of want to know what you’re up to.”

                Arthur looked away from Sasha. “I’m going to go hook up with a guy I met at flamenco dancing last week.”

                Sasha blinked. “ _What?”_ he whispered.

                He turned back towards Sasha. “What do you mean?”

                “I mean… um…” For one of the first times in his life, Sasha genuinely didn’t know how to react to something he had just heard. “I just never thought I would hear that string of words come out of anyone’s mouth. Least of all yours.” Despite this, however, he couldn’t help but feel a slight tinge of satisfaction that he had been right that, in the eloquent words of Klemens, Arthur was so deep in the closet that he was… Sasha couldn’t actually remember exactly what Klemens had said, but he remembered thinking that it was kind of dumb.

                When they reached the bottom of the stairs at last and exited the building, Sasha said awkwardly, “Have fun doing… that.”

                “I appreciate it,” Arthur said before they parted their separate ways.

                As Sasha hurriedly walked the rest of the way to the grocery store in the cold, he marveled at the fact that he knew so few straight people. ‘ _It’s like,’_ he thought, ‘ _I just meet people, and completely coincidentally, they’re not straight. I think the only straight person I’m friends with is Caroline, but I don’t really_ know _because we don’t really talk about that sort of thing.”_ This led to a new train of thought in which he wondered whether it was really acceptable to call Caroline his friend. ‘ _She’s my ex-fiancé’s_ (ever since they had been engaged for a single week, Sasha humorously called Leo his ex-fiancé) _sister which is how she was introduced into my life, so perhaps it’s weird to refer to her as my friend, but at the same time I spend a lot of time with her at work and at home so I think I’m justified in referring to her as my friend… but if I introduced her to anyone else I would refer to her primarily as my ex-fiancé’s sister…”_

                He kept on contemplating the role that Caroline fulfilled in his life as he arrived at the grocery store and bought a carton of organic milk. When he went to purchase it, he grimaced at the fact that there were no self-checkout lanes before going to the nearest cashier.

                ‘ _The cashier here looks familiar… have I met her before? Do I know her from somewhere?’_ And Sasha racked his mind wondering where he might have met this woman before his eyes widened he realized that they had _not_ met before, ever, and that he felt that he vaguely recognized her because she had the same nose and eyes as his sister.

                The sister whom he had only known when she was in a coma.

                Drunk driving was a hell of a thing.

                Before Sasha knew exactly what was going on, the cashier asked him, “Sir are you okay?”, to which he blindly replied, “I’m okay… thank you…” before he took his milk and walked home.

                He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about it. He _didn’t want to think about it._ It had been two whole days since he had relieved the traumatic memories of watching Sanya’s heartline go flat in the intensive care unit, one of the crude points of tangency between the living and the dead.

                Two days! It had been… he counted in his head… five months since all of it had taken place, and still, he couldn’t help but remark on the fact that his sister’s full name was _Alexandra_ and his was _Alexandre._ He couldn’t help but think to himself, day in, day out, that the devil had taken the wrong Sasha.

\---

                As of late, Sasha had been spending less and less time with Leo because… reasons. And unlike before, when he felt that he absolutely _had_ to spend every second of every day around other people, he had retracted into himself to the point where he acted largely like he had before – that is to say, he chose to spend more and more time alone, more and more time refusing to face the world in all of its tyrannical glory. Despite this, he spent a considerable amount of his time just strolling around and around and exploring the city just because he didn’t want to go home. He desperately wanted to believe that everyone he loved was slowly pushing him away, but as he days dragged on, it was increasingly evident that _he_ was pushing everyone he loved, but he was too deep in the game at this point to stop in his tracks. But whenever he _was_ around other people, he couldn’t help but act well-humored and charismatic and productive and content, so nobody seemed to notice how unhappy he truly was.

                In the third week of February, he received in his P.O. box the Schengen visa which he had applied for so that he could attend Leo’s sister’s wedding in France in April, but for the first time he wondered if he really even wanted to go. Previously, he had been _excited_ because he had never actually visited any European country west of Greece before, but now, as he held the coveted Schengen visa in his own two hands, he realized that he didn’t really want to go. He _would_ go, of course, because he had an obligation to be there at this point, but that didn’t mean that he _wanted_ to.

                After about a month of this, when it came mid-March, Leo was the first person to notice that Sasha hadn’t been acting like himself lately, but he didn’t know how to approach him about it without offending him in some way, shape, or form. So he decided to wait and see what happened before he mentioned anything.

                Caroline was the second person to notice, and because she wasn’t as tactfully skilled as her older brother was, just asked Sasha one day, “Sasha, are you okay?”

                To which he answered, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

                She didn’t buy it. “Are you sure?”

                Sasha nodded nonchalantly. “Absolutely,” he answered. “I am _all_ alright.”

                “Do you want to talk about it?”

                “There’s nothing to talk about.”

                Once Sasha said that he wasn’t going to talk about something, there was absolutely no way of making him talk about it, so in a last-ditch effort to get him to talk, Caroline asked, “Is this about—”

                She wasn’t able to finish her sentence before Sasha mercilessly cut her off. “No,” he shook his head. “It’s not about him, and honestly, I don’t know how you managed to think that could be even remotely accurate.” Caroline had succeeded in offending Sasha to the point of no return.

                “Wait, but that’s not even—”

                “And whatever you _were_ going to say, I don’t want to hear it.”

                “You have to—”

                “I don’t want to hear it, okay?”

                After being shut down mid-sentence several more times, Caroline tried to think of what she could possibly say so that Sasha would actually listen to what she had to say. So finally, before Sasha could tell her that he wasn’t going to listen to her another time, she said in a fast slur of words, “ _Sasha-I-know-that-you-cheated-on-my-brother.”_

                Sasha physically felt his heart sink. “How do you know that?”

                “I just do, okay?” ‘ _So maybe I eavesdropped on Arthur and Klemens through the wall, which wasn’t entirely ethical, but whatever.’_

                “How long have you known this?”

                “Months,” answered Caroline. “Since last summer.”

                “How do you know this?” he asked again. Every one of Sasha’s words was sharp and biting, but nevertheless, Caroline maintained her silence.

                “Why should I tell you?”

                “Because this is a matter which deeply concerns me and that you have nothing to do with?”

                “Well, I’m not going to tell you because you’ve been a jerk to me for the past five minutes.”

                “Five minutes?” repeated Sasha incredulously. He had always carried a certain level of disdain for grown men who picked fights with teenage girls, but here he was, a grown man, picking a fight with a teenage girl. Wonderful. “Completely ignoring the past nine months in which I have never _once_ said a mean word to you?”

                “Yeah, even considering that, I’d like an apology.” Caroline loved both Leo and Sasha, but she absolutely abhorred living with two men, neither of whom seemed to be able to admit that they were wrong.

                “I’m not going to apologize to you after getting angry about the fact that you asked me a question about a part of my life that you have no right to be involved with in any way whatsoever.”

                “I asked you if you were okay, and if you wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t get to finish my third question because you interrupted me in the middle of it! And I wasn’t going to ask you if it was because of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. _You_ were the one who brought him up to begin with!”

                “And what _were_ you going to ask me about?”

                ‘ _I hate trying to reason with men so much,’_ thought Caroline as she said, “I was going to ask you if it was because of school or work… _god!”_

                Sasha stared scrupulously at Caroline for a moment before deciding that she was telling the truth and replying, “Okay.”

                “Now admit that you were wrong and apologize.”

                He had always held a certain level of disdain for grown men who grew irrationally angry at teenage girls for no good reason, but here he was, a grown man, who had grown irrationally angry at a teenage girl for no good reason. Fabulous. “I was wrong and I apologize,” said Sasha. This was the most generic statement he could possibly have said, but Caroline fortunately accepted it. “Now will you please tell me how you know about it?” he pleaded.

                “You really want to know?”

                “Yeah, I really do.”

                “One time I was being unethical and eavesdropping on a conversation between Arthur and Klemens through the wall and Arthur accused Klemens of having an affair with you and Klemens pretty much admitted.”

                Like the time that Arthur had told him that he was going to go hook up with a guy from flamenco dancing, this sentence took a moment for Sasha to digest properly. So if Arthur knew about it from the beginning, it would actually make a lot of sense given some recent interactions he had had with the guy, and Klemens, once again, was absolutely useless. Fucking Klemens. Even when he wasn’t a part of Sasha’s life anymore, he still managed to make it terrible.

                “And why haven’t you told your brother about this?” asked Sasha.

                “Because I’m selfish,” Caroline answered without a trace of doubt on her face, “and I don’t want you two to break up. But it was also for his sake.”

                “How so?”

                “Can you imagine? If my brother got his heart broken again then he would either go back to Josephine immediately or stay lonely for the rest of his life. Both are worse.” The words _both are worse_ hung in the air between them for a hot second.

                “So you’re not going to tell anyone? You just have this information and you’re not going to leverage it against me?”

                Caroline, too, had to take a moment to think about it before finally she came to a solution that was probably unethical. “Sasha, I want you to do something for me.”

                “What do you want?”

                Very slowly, she said, “Since you’re clearly not going to take the initiative yourself, I want you to go see a therapist.”

\---

                Possibly the strangest situation that Sasha had ever been in to date was when his boyfriend’s younger sister essentially blackmailed him into seeing a therapist. He knew that it was probably for the better— for his better, for the better of his relationship with Leo and everyone around him— he still couldn’t help but feel that in some way, his personal integrity had been deeply compromised by being forced to talk to someone else about his problems.

                ‘ _How_ dare _Caroline force me to do something that’s actually good for me!’_ Sasha thought angrily but with a hint of humor. ‘ _The first and last time I talked to anyone about my problems, that was fucking awful… Klemens probably still thinks that I’m psychotic and emotionally unstable…’_ (He didn’t.)

                Sasha vowed to never let Leo know that he had started going to therapy, because, like many others, Sasha genuinely thought that it was something to be ashamed of. And for all he knew, Leo would look down on him for forcibly seeking help for his problems, because _he_ rarely ever seemed to show any deep level of emotion, let alone need help for it.

                Perhaps speaking to an actual therapist would help to alleviate some of the misery and ashamedness that Sasha felt now, but just the fact that this was something that he was being forced to do made him feel even worse than he already did— which was a _lot_. He wondered if it would be possible to just _tell_ Caroline that he was going to therapy but to actually just not go; in any case, therapy was _expensive_ , and he really didn’t have the money to be spending hundreds of dollars on something that he didn’t even think he needed; but then again, if it was bad enough that other people noticed and forced him to do something about it, then it may have been just a bit worthwhile.

                So, after doing some research, Sasha gave in and scheduled an appointment with a therapist a week from today, and decided that if he _didn’t_ enjoy it in any way, then he would just never go ever again and just lie that he had.

                A week later, he emerged from the office into the gloomy February atmosphere and decided that he never wanted to go to another therapy session again. Another two weeks later in mid-March when he had scheduled his next session, he had built up so much steam that he decided to go again, and so the cycle continued.

                And little by little, he became— not happy again, perhaps, but more able to live with himself again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yikes
> 
> im BOUTTA START writing the LAST CHAPTER, chapter 25, and I am SAD
> 
> friendly reminder that comments are always very appreciated!


	21. Adolescence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They had had this conversation several times before, but the possibility of Leo’s family not liking Sasha seemed to be a hypothetical that he never got tired of teasing. Leo rolled his eyes at Sasha in an understanding way. “We’ve talked about this so many times before. My family already doesn’t like the fact that I’m dating a guy. All you can do is try to make a good impression.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i read about all of the bonaparte siblings for this but ended up mentioning like three of them   
> O   
> WELL  
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

                On April third, Leo, Caroline, and Sasha were all figuring out whatever else they needed to take to France for Pauline Bonaparte’s wedding half an hour before they left to go to the airport. The day was both exciting and nerve-wracking for all of them.

                As he tried to figure out what else he could possibly carry in his suitcase that would be of use, Sasha looked over at Leo on the other side of the room, and asked, “What if your family doesn’t like me?” Even though they were about to go on a long transcontinental flight, he had made an exorbitant effort to dress as nicely as possible while still being comfortable.

                They had had this conversation several times before, but the possibility of Leo’s family not liking Sasha seemed to be a hypothetical that he never got tired of teasing. Leo rolled his eyes at Sasha in an understanding way. “We’ve talked about this so many times before. My family already doesn’t like the fact that I’m dating a guy. All you can do is try to make a good impression.”

                At the sound of Leo explaining yet again that his family didn’t like the idea of Sasha’s existence, Caroline, who had been pacing around in the living room, came over and stuck her head through the doorway. “Are we talking about how our family doesn’t like Sasha?” she asked. She seemed to act less reserved around Sasha ever since she realized that she had some level of power over him, and while she didn’t really abuse this in any way, he wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

                “Wow, you’re making things so much better, Caroline,” said Leo flatly as she entered the room completely.

                Caroline tried to avoid coming into the shared bedroom of her brother and his boyfriend at all costs because she didn’t like to think about all of the nasty things that went on in here, but here she was, anyway. “You’ll be fine, Sasha,” she appended her original statement.

                Leo closed his eyes and sighed. “Wait until my family sees that you’re a Russian with a piercing and a tattoo and not just some nice Canadian fellow I met online.”

                “The anti-Russian sentiment is very real in France,” his sister nodded.

                Sasha didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I like to think that I’m just a nice fellow who happens to be from Russia. You guys are making it sound like I’m in the _bratava_ or something.”

                “The what?” both Leo and Caroline asked at the same time.

                “Is that not what you call it in French? I think it translates to… the _brotherhood?”_

                Leo shook his head. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

                “You know, it’s a gang of people who are famous for organized crime… it’s a really terrible gang in Russia… do you really not know what I’m taking about?”

                “You mean…” Caroline said as she thought about it. “You mean the Russian mafia?”

                “Yeah! The… Russian mafia.” It was clearly the first time he had heard those words together.

                “Hey, Caroline?” said Leo.

                “Yeah?”

                “Can I talk to Sasha alone for a moment?”

                “Okay,” she replied as she left and closed the door on the way out.

                Leo looked at Sasha and lowered his voice considerably. “My sister really gets on my nerves sometimes,” he said very quietly. “Right now is one of those times. I didn’t have anything particularly important to tell you. I just wanted her to leave.”

                “ _Lowkey same,”_ Sasha whispered. He really liked Caroline, but he felt an unquenchable bitterness towards her every one of the three times that he had been to therapy so far. “I kind of miss when you and I just lived together…” He paused. “You know, now that I think about it, we never celebrated our one-year anniversary.”

                “We don’t really have one,” Leo pointed out. “I don’t think there’s any exact start date on when we became a couple.”

                “I suppose so.”

                “If I had to put any chronology on our relationship, it would be that you confessed your undying love me for me…”

                “That moment was so emotionally scarring that I don’t remember most of it, but I definitely know that I never _once_ did that,” Sasha interjected, but Leo continued without acknowledging his interjection.

                “And then I kissed you, and for the couple of months after that we just had dates and hooked up so often that you spent the night here so much that you just ended up moving in. And here we are.”

                “That’s a gross oversimplification of…” He checked his wristwatch. “We can talk about this later, but right now, we have to _go_ or we’re going to miss our flight _.”_

\---

                The first familiar face whom Leo, Sasha, and Caroline met at airport in Paris was that of Joseph Bonaparte, the eldest of the Bonaparte siblings. When they first saw him, all three of them had vastly different reactions. Leo said, “Hey, it’s my brother.”; Caroline ran forward to give him a warm embrace; Sasha, who had obviously never met Joseph before, merely thought, ‘ _He’s like an older and less-attractive version of Leo,’_ and immediately felt bad about it.

                When Leo finally came face-to-face with his brother for the first time in seven years, to Sasha’s surprise, the two brothers shared an equally friendly embrace. ‘ _What the fuck?’_ Sasha wondered. He knew that their relationship had once been tense, but he was taken aback by the fact that the two of them were actually friends again now. Kostya probably wouldn’t hesitate to spit in his face or some equivalent.

                “Napoléon!” said Joseph when the two reunited. “How are you?”

                “Joseph, come on, it’s been years! We can do without the small talk.” Even from this small exchange, Joseph could tell that Leo was pretty much the same person as when he had left France to begin with. Maybe a bit more mature, but that was it. Leo then grasped onto Sasha’s hand and introduced him to his brother. “Joseph,” he said, “this is my partner, Sasha. And Sasha, this is my brother Joseph.”

                “Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov,” Sasha introduced himself, shaking Joseph’s hand, “but I go by Sasha. _Enchanté.”_

                Leo had said that he had a boyfriend, but never that he was Russian or that he was _extremely tall_ or that he had orange hair, and all of these qualities took Joseph aback; Napoleon had always seemed so utterly _heterosexual_ to him. “Joseph Bonaparte,” he said. “Without a U. _Enchanté._ ” He had the same accent as Leo, but it was considerably subtler.

                On the way to wherever Leo’s entire family lived, Sasha didn’t really listen and mostly stared out of the window as Joseph drove and caught up with both of his siblings who had been in Canada for the past months or years. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but he felt awfully out of place in Joseph’s small car with three of the Bonaparte siblings, and of course it didn’t help when the occasional phrase in Italian or Corsican or _whatever_ it was floated through their conversation. It was perhaps the first time that Sasha wished he was close friends with a Russophone other than Maria. It was the first time that he felt such a deep longing to speak his native language again. He didn’t understand at the time, perhaps because the notion that he never wanted to visit his home country again if he could help it had lodged itself so deeply into his mind, but this was the first time he had ever felt homesick.

                At the end of what seemed like a two-and-a-half-hour-long drive, Joseph finally said to Sasha, “Hey, Sasha.”

                Sasha immediately became alert from the half-dreamlike state he had been in before. “Yes?”

                “I don’t know if Napoleon or Caroline ever told you…”

                “What did we forget to tell Sasha?” interrupted Caroline.

                Leo’s eyes widened for a split second as he remembered that he had actually forgotten something, which was a rare occasion. “Oh!” he exclaimed. Leo was normally soft-spoken, so when he said something loudly, it was a sign that it was _especially_ worth listening to. “We forgot to tell you that our mother doesn’t speak French.”

                “Really?” Sasha didn’t want to sound rude, but that was his immediate reaction. Wonderful. Just excellent.

                “She _understands_ it, but doesn’t actually speak it well enough to have in-depth conservations or anything.”

                Joseph took the opportunity to change the topic of conversation and addressed Sasha again. “So Sasha, are you from Russia?” he asked, even though he knew that the answer was _yes_.

                “Yes,” answered Sasha. “I’m from Saint Petersburg.”

                “How long have you been in Canada?”

                “Just about three years now.” And this sort of pseudo-interrogation continued until they finally reached the Bonaparte household.

\---

                The Bonapartes’ house was small, but it was certainly lively. Of course, it was _technically_ Leo’s home in one of his hometowns, but because he had spent so many of his formative years in boarding school, it seemed almost an alien atmosphere to him. He supposed that this had never really been _home_ , but instead, just the place where the rest of his family lived, and that in itself made the small house comfortable enough.

                From the moment that he stepped through the front door with his suitcase in his hand, the rest of his family whom he hadn’t seen in seven years acted as if he had been dead all the time and had just now come back to life.

                “ _Napoleone_!” his mother exclaimed in Italian when she saw him after all that time. “Have you been eating anything? You look like a skeleton!” That was typical Letizia Ramolino Buonaparte.

                He took turns giving hugs and kisses to all of his sisters and brothers as Caroline did the same, and after five minutes, after the excitement had quelled a bit, he finally turned back around and took Sasha’s hand (Sasha was standing as close to the wall as was possible without being awkward about it).

                Leo introduced his beloved to the rest of the Bonaparte clan by saying, “And this is my partner, Sasha.”

                And Sasha took turns shaking the hands of all of Leo’s immediate family and tried to keep track of who was who. He managed to keep a mental note about all of them so he wouldn’t fuck up horrendously when he tried to remember all of their names. He couldn’t even remember all of his biological siblings’ names.

  * Leo, also known as Napoléon or Napoleone, was the one whom he was in love with.
  * Caroline was just Caroline.
  * Joseph (Giuseppe), was the eldest and the one who had met them in the airport.
  * Jérôme was the youngest of all of them by far.
  * Elisa was the sister who wasn’t Caroline and wasn’t getting married, either.
  * Pauline was strikingly beautiful and was also getting married.
  * Lucien was the Bonaparte sibling who looked the least like the others
  * Louis was the least attractive of all of the Bonapartes, and Sasha felt bad for thinking it.



                Nobody quite knew what to say after that, so Leo’s mother broke the silence by saying, again in Italian, “You all must be tired… do you want to sleep before you do anything else?” and Leo answered “Yes,” on the behalves of himself, Sasha, and Caroline.

\---

The room where Leo and Sasha were supposed to put their things and sleep used to be the room that Joseph, Lucien, Louis, and Jérôme used to share, but because Joseph, Lucien, and Louis lived in other parts of Paris now, it was really just Jérôme’s, but because Jérôme had been temporarily displaced to make space for Leo and Sasha, it was theirs for the next five days. The room, which used to be occupied by two bunk beds for the duration of time that all four of Leo’s brothers had shared it, now just had one decently-sized bed that was about the same size, as not slightly smaller than, the one in Leo’s apartment.

He closed his eyes and shut the door after he had gotten everything in the room. “This is the room that all of my brothers used to share,” he said to Sasha.

“I forgot that you never actually lived here,” replied Sasha, opening his suitcase and finding clean clothes to wear.”

Leo didn’t even bother to change clothes before sleeping, but merely took off his shirt and pants, folded them, and set them aside before he lay down to sleep.

“You’re not even going to bother changing clothes?” asked Sasha with a tone of scrutiny.

“As someone who doesn’t even bother wearing clothes to sleep half of the time, you have no right to judge me.”

“Touché.”

\---

                Leo didn’t do much in preparation for Pauline’s wedding; for him, most of the two days before the occasion were filled with spending time with the rest of his family and meeting friends in Paris whom he hadn’t seen in years. On his second day in Paris, he met up with his best friend, Jean Lannes, in a downtown café that he remembered going to years ago. Throughout the time that Leo had lived in Canada, the two of the had talked to each other once every Sunday, and Jean was perhaps the only person in the world with whom Leo felt that he could be honest about everything. And Jean, in turn, was _deeply_ critical of almost everything that Leo did.

                When Leo saw Jean for the first time in seven years, he approached him from behind very quietly and tapped him on the shoulder. Jean, however, didn’t flinch at all. His years in the French Armed Forces had taken away most of his ability to be surprised at anything.

                “What’s that?” Jean asked aloud, just to fuck with Leo a bit. “It’s like a fly is trying to land on my shoulder. Like a light breeze is drifting past as I speak…” He continued to do this until Leo was fed up with his shenanigans and finally decided to walk around him and give a proper greeting.

                “Oh!” exclaimed Jean when he finally saw Leo. “It’s not a light breeze, it’s been Napoléon Bonaparte trying to get my attention this whole time!”

                Leo and Jean gave each other a warm embrace and Leo said, “Jean, I hate you so much.”

                “I know. Don’t worry, I know what pisses you off.”

                “In my opinion, you’re a little bit too good at it.”

                The two of them ordered coffee and sat at one of the outdoor tables of the café. “So I hear you have a boyfriend now,” said Jean.

                “Dear lord,” replied Leo. “It’s like whenever I see someone, the first thing they want to talk to me about isn’t how I’m doing, or what I’ve been up to the past seven years, but my boyfriend. On that note, how’s the divorce going, Jean?” On the outside, Leo and Jean were usually terrible to each other, but both of them knew that it was all in good fun.

                “Pretty bad, considering that we’re still married. I would rather be on active duty than have to deal with lawyers.”

                Leo smiled. For he also shared an irrational hatred of lawyers, this appealed to his sense of humor. “You know, I came _very_ close to joining the armed forces after I left school.”

                “Why didn’t you?”

                “There are many things which I will go to the ends of the earth to accomplish, but getting into shape is not one of them.”

                “I could probably pick you up over my head and throw you at least ten feet.”

                “I thought you were going to say that you could pick me up and throw me into a trash can.”

                Jean just looked at Leo. “Why would I say that?”

                “Well, one time Sasha…”

                “So now _you’re_ the one bringing up your boyfriend,” interjected Jean, but Leo ignored him.

                “One time Sasha told me that he could pick me up and throw me into a trash can, and almost actually did it.”

                “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Something about you just seems so… viable to pick up and throw.”

                Leo changed the subject. “Anyway. That’s enough about picking me up and throwing me into a trash can, or anywhere else.” He felt more relaxed around Jean than anyone else, because he felt as though Jean was the only person he had ever met who understood him from the get-go. Even Sasha hardly understood him, and they were in love.

                “You’re the same as you’ve ever been, Leo. Perhaps a bit more dry, and older, and just a bit more cynical, but you’re exactly the same as you were when you left France seven years ago.”

                “Don’t act like you’ve changed all that much, Jean,” he said, but even as he was saying it, he knew that between both of them, he was the one that had undergone the least amount of change in the time that they had physically been apart. Was that such a bad thing, though? Leo _liked_ his personality, and knew that _if_ he underwent any change at this point, he would just end up a worse person than before.

                “I like to think that I’ve become a better person,” Jean sighed. “I can’t say whether I have or not, because that’s not up for me to decide, but I wish I was.”

                Leo smiled sadly. “What are we doing with our lives, Jean? We met when we were such young men and now we’re spiraling onto a plateau of boredom and false wisdom. Now what?”

                “You talk like you’re an old man, but you’re forgetting that we’re both thirty years old.”

                Nodding, he said, “That’s also something that I get a lot.”

                “If one of us flames out and dies young, in any case, it’s probably going to be me.”

                “Why do you say that?”

                “I’m in the French Armed Forces.”

                “I’m never going to die.”

                Jean rolled his eyes at Leo in a good-humored fashion. This was exactly the kind of shit that classified Leo so well as a closet romantic. “I don’t think we’ve had a single conversation in the past three years that wasn’t about death in any way, shape, or form.”

                “And I don’t think there’s anything more frivolous that we could be talking about.” Leo gently brushed Jean’s fingers with his own on the table. “I’ve missed you, Jean Lannes,” he said softly.

                “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve missed you as well, Napoléon.”

\---

                Leo’s entire family spoke Italian when they were at home, and although none of the Bonapartes really _minded_ switching to French whenever Sasha was around, Leo could tell that Sasha didn’t like it one bit because it made him feel as if he was inconveniencing everyone else. In any case, there wasn’t as much time as Leo had hoped for all of them to sit and have nice long talks with each other because everyone had their own affairs to take care of, and of course, a considerable amount of time went into making the preparations for Pauline’s wedding. As far as Leo was concerned, the majority of his family members saw Sasha more as an accessory of his than as anything else, and Leo quite honestly didn’t care that much.

                As for Sasha, whatever little time he actually spent engaging with Leo’s family, he mostly enjoyed it, other than the fact that he felt somewhat like a burden for not knowing how to speak Italian. Well, whatever. He was here for Leo’s family, and his own feelings were secondary to everything else at this moment in time. The member of Leo’s family whom he ended up conversing with the most was Jérôme, who was only fifteen years old, because neither of them had anything important to do or any old friends to meet in Paris, so they found themselves together a lot of the time. Most of their conversations seemed to focus on the cultural differences between France and Russia.

                The few times that Sasha was able to speak to Leo’s mother were generally simple conversations in which she asked him questions in order to scrutinize him and determine whether he was a good enough partner to be with her favorite son, but at the same time, he could tell that his presence made her somewhat uncomfortable, probably because he was gay, so he mostly stayed out of her way. On a few occasions he spoke with Elisa or Joseph when he had the chance, and overall, being with Leo’s family was a heck of a lot better than being with his own family.

                At one point in the late morning on the day before Pauline’s wedding, Jérôme saw Sasha kind of just hanging out by himself because almost everyone was out running errands, and said, “You know you’re allowed to leave the house, right?”

                Sasha actually hadn’t taken it into account that he was allowed to leave the house, and had spent the better part of the past day here. “I _should_ leave the house,” he replied, slightly embarrassed.

                “You want to go somewhere with me?” asked Jérôme. “Like, I don’t know, the Champs Élysées?”

                “Do French people actually hang out there?”

                Jérôme shrugged. “I’ve been there a _few_ times, so not really. But come on, I’ll take you, because you’re in Paris for four days.”

                So the two of them spent a long while on public transit all the way to the Champs Élysées, and when they reached it, Sasha wondered if the west end of the avenue would have been a good place for a monument. It was the first time that it really dawned on him that he was, in fact, in France, and the city that Leo liked to call home. Because it had been raining earlier that day, the sky was still grey and the ground was wet, but he didn’t know if it would have been any more impressive even if there had been blue skies and warm weather.

                “There are so many people,” he commented. There were never this many people in Quebec City.

                “There are always this many people.”

                “Do you want to go somewhere else?” Sasha hated crowds even more than he hated noise.

                So they went through public transit to a less crowded street in Paris, and walked around for a few hours just taking in the scenery. If he had told himself two years ago that now he would be meandering throughout downtown Paris with Leo’s sixteen-year-old brother, he wouldn’t believe himself. Everything had changed so much since then.

                “I can’t believe that Pauline’s getting married tomorrow,” Jérôme disclosed to Sasha after they had talked a bit more. “It’s stupid, but before there were eight of us, and now I’ll be the only one who lives at home, and I can’t help but feel nostalgic for all of the times that I took for granted.”

                “You know, your speech is kind of sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old.”

                “I’m sixteen.”

                “Still.” Sasha continued, “Growing up isn’t _that_ big of a deal. Or at least it’s not _as_ big of a deal as people make it out to be.”

                Jérôme shrugged. “If I wanted a real grown-up’s opinion then I would ask Giuseppe.”

                 Sasha was beginning to think that a tactless sense of honesty just ran in the Bonaparte family, so although Jérôme’s statement hurt his feelings, he let it go. He didn’t know what sixteen-year-old French boys liked to talk about, so he didn’t know what to say to Jérôme. “Okay.”

                “Did I hurt your feelings? You said that like I hurt your feelings.”

                “No, we’re fine,” reassured Sasha. “It’s okay.”

                “Okay.”

                They kept walking for a while, and Jérôme decided that he liked Sasha, mainly because he didn’t try to make conversation when there wasn’t much to discuss between them. Jérôme himself didn’t like talking to other people that much, and mostly kept to himself wherever he went. Sometimes there was just no need to fill the space between two people, and now was one of those times.

\---

                Leo woke up early on the day of the wedding, and as usual, he couldn’t get back to sleep. He went to the kitchen just to hang out, as he usually did when he was back in Canada, and there he found Pauline and Caroline both in their pajamas at the long kitchen table.

                “Hey,” he said when he saw the two of them. Because he usually didn’t see anyone else when he woke up in the middle of the night, he wasn’t expecting to see anyone. “Am I interrupting something?” He turned to Pauline, his _favorite_ sister. “You’re getting married in the morning. You should go back to sleep,” he said to her.

                Pauline shook her head. “I can’t get to sleep, Napoléon, and looking tired is nothing that modern makeup can’t fix.”

                Leo closed his eyes. “It’s the twenty-first century, Pauline,” he sighed. “Marriage isn’t that big of a deal anymore.” Now he sounded like Sasha, who didn’t seem to think that anything of this world was that big of a deal. Pauline, in Leo’s opinion, was way too young for this shit.

                “Napoleone, go to sleep,” Caroline told him as Jérôme entered the room. “Jérôme, go to sleep.”

                “Well, as long as the four of us as here, we might as well stay awake,” said Pauline. “The other four can go to hell.”

                Leo had spent so long as an authority figure that it felt strange that his siblings didn’t treat him as one, but it was kind of nice all the same. It was as if, in the few hours that separated the moment that they had gathered to that dawn, that he caught a glimpse of what his adolescence might have been like if he hadn’t gone to boarding school and if he hadn’t made the choices which led him to become Leo. The four Bonaparte siblings talked around the kitchen table until the day broke, and Leo felt a twinge of nostalgia in his heart when it was over. He was an adult who had adult things to worry about; Caroline was going to college in about a month; Pauline was getting married that same day; Jérôme was rapidly learning how to stop being a child. Leo didn’t realize that that night was the first and last time he would ever have a moment like that with his family.

\---

                There was a civil ceremony at the _Mairie_. There was another ceremony at the Catholic church which the Leclerc family frequented. There was a traditional wedding meal and dancing and drinking, and then there was more dancing and drinking. Leo’s mother, Elisa, Caroline, and Sasha all began to tear up when Pauline said her vows, and Leo’s feelings of desperation and disappointment that Pauline chose to get married faded into the realization that this was just how it was going to be from now on.

                Leo smiled when he spoke to his sister after the civil ceremony was over. “Congratulations, Pauline _Leclerc,”_ he said, hugging her tightly. He remembered when he was engaged to someone right around Pauline’s age. What that would have been like. How miserable it would have been. He hadn’t said any real prayers in years, but just this once, he asked god to do him a favor on Pauline’s behalf.

                Pauline smiled back at him. “I think,” she said, “that I’m going to keep Bonaparte. It just sounds better, doesn’t it?”

                Leo took a subtle glance at Sasha, who was standing right beside him. “I think that Bonaparte always sounds better,” he replied.

                She glanced at Sasha as well. “Leo, maybe you’ll be the next one to get married, and we’ll all have to come to Canada for you.”

                Kissing Pauline on the cheek, he said, “Or maybe not.”

                Later that night, Leo danced with Sasha. Despite the fact that they had been together for a year and four months now and despite the fact that both of them were fairly good at dancing, Leo could count the number of times that they had danced together on one hand. Sasha had promised to _not_ get drunk at Pauline’s wedding, but right now, he was clearly a bit intoxicated, but not drunk enough that he had no idea what he was saying. In this state, he whispered to Leo, “This is… nice. We should do this sometime.”

                “What, go dancing?” asked Leo, gripping Sasha’s hand more tightly than he had been before.

                “No…” mumbled Sasha. “We should get married.”

                Leo sighed. “You know, it’s rude to propose at someone else’s wedding.”

                “So that’s a no?” He didn’t seem particularly broken up about it, but something (probably the fact that they had already been engaged for a week before breaking it off) told Leo that he wouldn’t take it _too_ badly.

                “Yes.” Leo paused. “That’s a no.”

                “That’s alright,” Sasha mumbled again. In the relative darkness, he gave Leo a long kiss, and soon thereafter, the night ended.

                The next two days in Paris were far lonelier than the first three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just finished writing this fic for GOOD and oh boi what am i gna do with my life NOW
> 
> here i am.... the author..... begging u to comment......... pls


	22. Fire Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caroline moves out. Sasha stops going to therapy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters one day ayy lmao

                Everything went back to normal after Pauline’s wedding, and as May rapidly approached, Caroline lamented over the fact that the past year had gone by so quickly. She was taking summer classes at her university, and because she wanted to get to know the city before she actually started living there, she had decided to move there a couple of weeks beforehand. Her last day in Quebec City was on April twenty-second, and before she knew it, she had already handed in her two weeks’ notice to La République and left her bedroom looking as if nobody had ever lived there.

                On the day that she left Quebec City for the next few months, Leo and Sasha both came with her to the train station before she left. Caroline was clearly very excited, Leo was sullen about the whole affair, and Sasha was tearing up a little bit but tried to subtly wipe his few tears away.

                “Sasha, are you crying?” asked Caroline. Sasha wept or at least came close to weeping on a fairly regular basis, but she hadn’t expected him to start _now_.

                Leo answered for him. “Caroline,” he said, “you’re the closest thing we’re ever going to have to a daughter, and now you’re going to college. We’re both distraught. Have we raised you correctly? It’s time to find out.”

                “You didn’t raise me at all,” she pointed out.

                “Shut up.”

                “It won’t be that bad… I mean, you’ll finally have time to be alone… and do nasty things all over the apartment without having to worry about me walking in… and whatever you guys did before I moved in with you…”

                The train began to pull in at the station, and Caroline took this last chance to hug and kiss both Leo and Sasha on the cheek. “I love both of you!” she exclaimed before boarding the train. “I’ll see you soon! Hopefully!”

                “I love you, Caroline. Text me if anything happens!” called Leo.

                “I’ll miss you!” Sasha finally said before she disappeared and the train eventually pulled out of the station.

                “I’ll miss her…” Leo said, looking up at Sasha. “Oh, Sasha, are you really crying?”

                Sasha wiped a tear from the bottom of his face. “Just a little bit. Caroline annoys the fuck out of me sometimes, but she is like the sister I never had.”

                “You have six… _five_ sisters.” Nice save, Leo.

                “I know.”

                “Do you want to go eat cake?” Sasha _loved_ sweet food, so Leo thought that perhaps eating cake would help cheer him up.

                “I do. I always do.”

                “And when we get home do you want to make sweet love on the living room sofa like we’ve been unable to do for the past eleven months?”

                “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

\---

                That night, Leo and Sasha both sat in the darkness with their legs dangling off of the side of the fire escape and both wrapped in a large blanket because it was still cold in the night-times. Leo held Sasha’s slightly sweaty hand, as if he was hoping to bridge the space that had indubitably grown between them. Although Leo hated doing almost anything with his hands— including holding Sasha’s— sometimes, when it was cold and dark like this, it was kind of nice.

                “It’s been a long time since we’ve been alone like this,” hummed Leo. A cricket chirped somewhere nearby. He sighed. “I could use a cigarette right now.”

                “I didn’t know you smoked.”

                “I don’t,” he said. “I stopped when I was twenty-two, but I still want a cigarette sometimes.”

                “I used to smoke for a while,” Sasha then revealed. “I wasn’t a particularly rebellious teenager but I _did_ do that. And then I got a tattoo.” He smiled, although Leo couldn’t see it.

                “Because sunflowers are so edgy, right?”

                “Well, my grandmother Catherine grew up in the Soviet Union and associated tattoos exclusively with prison culture, so naturally, I was yelled at quite a bit.”

                “I wasn’t particularly edgy when I was younger,” said Leo. He thought back to how he had visited a prostitute, written multiple suicide letters, seduced that American guy just because he _could_ , wore all black, ate spoonfuls of plain instant coffee, not had any friends, remained perpetually pessimistic, and very briefly considered leaving the country and just never coming back. He cringed inside. “Definitely not edgy at all.” He paused for a moment and then asked, “Sasha, what do you think about the Soviet Union?”

                “I was born the year after it dissolved, so I never actually lived in it.”

                “But what do you think of it?”

                Sasha _really_ didn’t like talking about politics in any way, mainly because he knew that most people outside of Russia frowned on his political beliefs, but he knew that Leo would keep pressing him about it if he didn’t answer, so he finally said, “I think that it was a good thing. That’s all that I’m going to say about it.”

“Sasha, I want you to tell me about… things.”

                “Like what?”

                “Just tell me about anything.”

                “I have nothing to talk about,” sighed Sasha, briefly resting his head on top of Leo’s. “You talk more than I do in this relationship.”

                Leo leaned forwards and upwards and kissed Sasha. “Have you considered that I just like the sound of your voice?” he mumbled.

                “Do you want me to recite Russian poetry to you?”

                “That would be so romantic.”

                It wasn’t romantic; it was just poetry that everyone had been forced to learn to recite in school, but if Leo thought it was romantic, then Sasha wasn’t about to contradict him. So he recited for about ten minutes until he was certain that Leo was just sleeping (or pretending to sleep) on his shoulder, and carried him inside to their bed. And he, thinking that he wasn’t _that_ tired, went to go do something productive, but in a few minutes fell into a deep sleep on the living room sofa.

\---

                Life moved on without Caroline, and for both Leo and Sasha, it grew lonelier. With Sasha out of the house so often, Leo found himself alone with his thoughts more than he ever had been before, and despite the amount of work that he did, he had more time than ever to reflect on the nature of their relationship. And because Sasha had been somewhat emotionally distant lately and because he spent so much time doing things that Leo didn’t know about, Leo began to seriously tease the thought: ‘ _What if Sasha was cheating on me?’_

                He knew that it was a fairly baseless claim, but the question still remained in his head. “ _What if he’s cheating on me?’_

                ‘ _But with whom?’_

 _If_ Sasha had cheated on him with anyone, he knew it would probably be Klemens von Metternich, but as far as he knew, Klemens had been out of his life since September. And that train of thought led him to the even more _baseless_ accusation, ‘ _What if Sasha lied to me and Klemens is still in his life and he’s cheating on me with him? Would that be fucked up, or what?’_

                It drove him positively insane on a day-to-day basis, but despite his social prowess, he had no idea how to ask Sasha if he was, in fact, cheating. Despite Leo’s social prowess, it never crossed his mind that Sasha was struggling with deep depression, and Sasha’s unwillingness to talk about it didn’t help things.

\---

                It was during one of the slower days that Sasha was working that he saw a familiar face come through the door, and he immediately felt an unbelievable amount of regret and grief when he saw her.

                “Hey, Maria,” he said weakly. Between school, and going out of the country, and everything else that had been going on, he had kind of forgotten that she existed and hadn’t seen her in about a month. “I’m really sorry…”

                “It’s okay. I just wanted to see you.”

                “I’m sorry.”

                “It’s okay.”

                “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you.”

                “Sasha, how are you doing?”

                Because it didn’t look like anyone else was going to come in anytime soon, Sasha locked the door of the store and sat with Maria at one of the tables. “I’ve been doing alright. How are you doing?”

                “Cut the small talk. The only reason I came is because I _know_ that you haven’t been doing well.”

                “We don’t have to talk about _me_ all the time.”

                “This time, it’s about you.” Caroline had asked Maria to talk Sasha into going to therapy again, because he had stopped going after the wedding.

                “Caroline… I mean, _Maria_ , I don’t know why I called you Caroline, I think that I want to break up with Leo.”

                Maria looked concerned. “But why?” It didn’t make sense to her why Sasha wanted to take whatever he had and destroy it.

                Sasha’s face visibly fell. “Well,” he began, “after I cheated on him…”

                “You did _what?”_

                “I… cheated on him,” he repeated. It felt a new sort of terrible to be finally saying it out loud.

                “With whom?”

                “You know… Klemens?”

                Maria’s face expressed a new sort of disappointment and the only way Sasha knew to avoid it was to look at the ground to avoid her gaze.

                “I like Leo, and I think that he’s perfect, and you know, we were thinking about getting married for a while, but I just feel _bad_ whenever I’m around him.”

                “Sasha, you know I love you, but that’s _bad_.”

                “I don’t want him to have to deal with it.”

                “All relationships either end up with breakup or marriage.”

                “I’m just a coward.” There. He finally said it for the first time. He, Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov, was a coward. He wasn’t even sure if he loved Klemens anymore. “I don’t want to deal with the consequences of my actions, and I don’t want to think about any of it, but it’s… fine, I suppose.”

                He was just a coward. And he didn’t care what the consequence was, but even as a coward, he wasn’t giving into what anyone else wanted him to do anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey please comment if you enjoy this work because I have no other source of feedback and I actually want to know your opinion (yes YOU individually)


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sasha!” exclaimed Klemens. “Why are you… here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to post the last three chapters all at the same time because starting tmr I have no internet access for seven weeks.

                Two months passed, and everything was the same as before. Caroline was away at college. Sasha was working more hours than before now that his first semester in college was over, but because it was summer, he was spending more time with Leo than ever. Leo continued to suspect that Sasha was cheating on him, but over time his suspicion had grown larger and larger until he was just one step away from confronting him about it.

                After having neglected his hobby for the past— what was it now— nine months(?), Sasha went back to figure skating, but quickly grew frustrated when he found that he wasn’t as _good_ as he used to be. Of course he knew that he wouldn’t be as _good_ after almost completely neglecting it for nine months, but it felt as if it were one disappointment in his life stacked on top of a tall pile of others.

                Sometimes Leo came with him just to spend time in the cold atmosphere, sometimes reading or doing other work, and sometimes just watching Sasha doing what he was doing. But even watching Sasha casually display more agility than most people would have in their lives left him with a bitter sense of disappointment that he wasn’t as much of a joy to watch as he used to be. He didn’t feel as if he loved Sasha any less than he had before, but even in general their relationship gave him less of a sense of satisfaction than it used to. Now, it felt to him less as if their life together was a structure that he had helped build, and more as if he was just another shoddy foundation for manipulation.

                Yet, Sasha was more important to Leo than he could have possible explained to anyone else, and instead of confronting him about it, he kept it in the back of his mind so that he could continue to be with his beloved. Hiding from the truth as he did _prolonged_ the arrival of the inevitable, sure, but it didn’t do anything to stop its approach altogether.

\---

                Another lazy Saturday night passed, and because it was the dead of summer, Sasha wouldn’t stop complaining. Leo, in a similar vein, continually complained about Sasha’s complaining, and this formed a positive cycle of complaining all the time. The two of them had just returned from an afternoon rendezvous to nowhere in particular, and now both of them were on the living room sofa. Leo leaned backwards onto Sasha while Sasha gently played with Leo’s soft hair. Both of them, for a moment, were content.

                And then it got worse.

                When Sasha looked back on those last few moments in the future, he couldn’t remember what they were about or even exactly what happened. He only remembered how contented he felt beforehand, and even that was hardly a memory; compared to what he felt afterwards, even pain would have caused him contentment.

                “…but it’s fine,” he said to Leo at the end of some long spiel which probably wasn’t about anything particularly important. “It’s not important. It’s not that big of a deal.”

                Leo turned around and looked at Sasha. He didn’t say anything for a moment, which was unusual for someone usually so sharp-tongued. “No, Sasha,” he said, “it’s not okay.”

                And Sasha frowned, confused at what Leo had just said. “What’s not okay?” He felt his heart sink, although he didn’t know why.

                “It’s not okay how you just… brush off everything in your life as not being important and not mattering.”

                “Leo, you have to understand that…” but he didn’t get to finish his sentence in the end.

                “Sasha, why do you always say that things don’t matter to you when they clearly do? Why are you so nonchalant about everything? Why are you so…”

                “So _what_?”

                “Complacent,” Leo finished. Cowardly. Afraid of change. Incapable of adapting to change. The words that he could have used were endless, but this was the first one which came to his mind.

                “I’m _not_ complacent,” argued Sasha, “and you don’t know what it’s like to be _me_.”

                The world stood still for a moment before Leo spoke again. “Sasha, you’ve been so irritable lately. I’m sorry for what I said, I _suppose_ (he wasn’t), but I just want to know…” he paused. “are you not happy anymore?”

                And with those words, Sasha, in his usual fashion, felt tears begin to fill his eyes. How he _hated_ his propensity to cry even anything even marginally emotional happened, but he couldn’t help it at this point. “I assure you, I’m _not_ unhappy,” he lied. “You see?” he asked, wiping away a tear. “I’m fine. I’m… perfectly fine.”

                “I know you’re not. I know that you just pretend and pretend that everything is perfectly alright even though it’s not and it won’t be. Tell me the truth, okay?”

                “What do you want to know the truth about?”

                “Do you love me anymore?”

                Sasha looked back at Leo. “Yes,” he said, almost pleading. “Yes, I do, I love you Leo, more than I…” _have ever loved anyone before_. But he couldn’t bring himself to say those words because they just weren’t true. “I _do_ love you, Leo. What are you… what are you trying to do?”

                “If you loved me, then you would be able to tell me why you’re not happy. Why you’re =depressed.”

                “I’m _not_ depressed.”

                “Sasha…” Leo didn’t know where to start. “You never eat anymore. You never sleep anymore. You drink more than you used to. You work all the time, but only because it gives you something to do. You don’t talk to anyone; in fact, you actively avoid even _me_. You started figure skating again, sure, but you don’t care about it the way you used to. There has to be a _reason_ for all of that. That doesn’t just _happen_ to someone.”

                “ _Stop!”_ exclaimed Sasha so loudly that it could be heard on the other side of the apartment walls. “Okay? I don’t understand what you’re trying to do. You’re just making everything worse.”

                “I just want to know why… I’ve known for a long time, and I’m sorry that I haven’t said anything to you about it, but I didn’t know what to say.”

                “It’s alright.”

                “Is it because of me?” Leo asked with genuine emotion and concern in his voice. “Did I do something? Are you just not happy being with me?”

                Sasha shook his head, and wiped more and more tears off of his face, but this time he spoke with a hint of anger. He looked at the ground. “It’s not _about_ you, Leo. You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s just a lot of things that have happened to me in the time that we’ve known each other, and… there are things I can’t tell you. And it’s been like that for a long time now, but still I wake up every day and I don’t know how to live with myself anymore.”

                Leo sighed. He loved Sasha, and he had never felt _exactly_ this way before, but… perhaps it was for the better that it ended now rather than later. At this moment in time, it was more evident than ever that they wouldn’t be together for much longer. And he said, very solemnly, “Sasha, we both know that the due course of events won’t change whether you tell me or not all of the things that you don’t think you can say to me.” He instantly regretted saying these words.

                “Leo…”

                “Yes?”

                “I cheated on you with Klemens.”

                He blinked. He wasn’t surprised, but he had never been so disappointed to be right about something before. “Sasha, what?”

                This time, Sasha said it more slowly. “I cheated on you with Klemens.” For the first time in months, he felt as if he could breathe more freely than before now that this was out in the open. “I’m not talking about the time last fall when I came home crying because of him. I mean that I… did everything… with him.”

                Leo stared at Sasha for what felt like a long time, his face and thoughts unreadable. He didn’t look sad or angry as he had been the _last_ time he found out that someone was cheating on him. He didn’t seem at all relieved by this revelation. Rather, his face and eyes were entirely neutral. Finally, he said, “Sometimes I find it hard to believe that two people like us ever managed to fall in love.”

                He continued, “I thought for a long time that you were cheating on me.”

                “Leo, I know that any apology I can give won’t…” but Sasha wasn’t able to finish his sentence.

                “…and I think that, despite everything…” he paused and thought for a moment. His own emotions were too much for him to take in. “I still love you, and someday, I might even be able to forgive you.

                “I want to think that you didn’t… that you didn’t do it on purpose. And I want to think that for at least a moment, what we had was really genuine. Because it took a long time for me to finally fall in love with you, but maybe, for one moment in time, we were in love without any other strings.”

                “So,” Sasha gestured to the space in between them. His tears had completely dried some time ago. “This is us.”

                Leo closed his eyes. “It’s over, Sasha. I wish everything would have worked out, but it didn’t. I think it’s for the better that you… take your things and leave.” Looking around the room, he realized for the first time how empty it would be once all traces of Sasha were gone. He realized that now that Caroline didn’t live here anymore and that Sasha would soon leave, he didn’t need this much space anymore. He was going to have to move again. “You don’t have to take everything you own just yet. Just… just find somewhere else to stay for the night. I need some time.”

                “I understand,” mumbled Sasha, and within five minutes, he was out of the apartment.

                When he left, Leo set back about to work, found all of the boxes in his apartment, and began to put Sasha’s things into them— his clothes, his tea collection, his books, his school supplies, all of the wall decorations which belonged to him. He took deep breaths as, when he was done with each room, he looked around and saw the very few objects which were left. There were pale patches of wall where both of the Renoir paintings had just hung.

                The life he had lived with Sasha was a merry one, and yet, it wasn’t his. It had long been Leo’s suspicion that perhaps he was just predestined to never find anyone who loved him and was loyal to him, and today’s events had just cemented those thoughts. That night, he went to sleep in a cold bed in an overly-spacious apartment that belonged to him only in name, and felt more than ever that he was alone. And for the first time in seven years, Leo Bonaparte began to cry.

\---

                It didn’t take long for Sasha to find somewhere to stay for the night. When he left the now-solely-Bonaparte household, he knocked quietly on Arthur’s door until Arthur answered. Sasha hadn’t had a real conversation with Arthur in longer than he would have liked to admit.

                After about two minutes, Arthur finally opened the damn door and carefully examined Sasha’s face. “Sasha, have you been crying?” he asked.

                Sasha nodded.

                Arthur opened the door a bit wider. “Here,” he said, “you should come in.”

                So he came in and faced Arthur with his back against the door.

                “Did you and Leo have a fight?”

                “It wasn’t really a fight,” mumbled Sasha, making eye contact with the other man. “But at the end of it, we weren’t together anymore.”      

                “You broke up with Leo.”

                “Technically, he broke up with me.”

                “Why?”

                “I told him what happened.” He paused. “And… I wanted a favor. From you.”

                “What is it?”

                “Will you let me spend the night here?”

                “Okay,” sighed Arthur. “The only place I have for you is a mattress on the floor where I also sleep, though.”

                “That’s completely fine.” So Sasha made himself comfortable in Arthur’s incredibly barren apartment with the satchel of things that he had haphazardly thrown in before leaving. The two of them continued to stand as they talked because of the general lack of chairs in Arthur’s apartment. Sasha, in his current state, didn’t notice how close Arthur was standing next to him.

                “Life moves on, Sasha,” Arthur said quietly, “and it moves quickly.”

                “I’m actually not that heartbroken.” Sasha’s speech was solemn and matter-of-fact. “I make bad decisions but I’m smart enough to know that there are consequences.”

                “I don’t really know else what to say to you.”

                “Sometimes there’s just nothing to say anymore. What’s done is done.”

                Both of them were silent for some time, staring at each other, because there really was nothing else to say anymore. After a few seconds, they began to move closer to each other and lean towards each other until they finally kissed. It was awkward.

                When the brief encounter ended, Arthur closed his eyes, shook his head, and said, “Too soon. Too soon.”

                “Yeah… no,” Sasha agreed, “too soon.”

\---

                When Sasha awoke the next morning, Arthur was already gone, and when he got dressed to enter Leo’s apartment to sort things out, he found several boxes near the door with a handwritten note on them. As he read the note, he didn’t think that the fact that Leo was technically now his ex had fully set in yet. The note read:

Sasha-  
take your things and leave. if you need anything else then only come here when you know i’m not around. come back in a couple of weeks if you want to talk things out.

– Napoléon Bonaparte.

                Because Sasha didn’t have anywhere else to put any of his things, he merely took what he needed to from the boxes and left everything else looking as if he had never been there to begin with. Then, he called Arthur on the phone for another favor.

\---

                Sasha hated asking for favors, but here he was, asking for another favor…………….

                “Sasha!” exclaimed Klemens. “Why are you… here?”

                “It’s good to see you too, Klemens.”

                “I mean, it’s wonderful to see you again, but I haven’t really talked to you in nine months and now you show up unannounced on my doorstep, so you can imagine that I’m a bit surprised.” He paused and then asked again, “So why are you here? Do you want to… come in?”

                Sasha stepped in, and Klemens closed the door behind him. “Do you remember when you said you would do me a favor?”

                Klemens nodded slowly. “Yes, I remember. I would do anything for you.”

                “Anything?”

                “Anything within my power, certainly,” he answered. Minus a few things, of course, but he didn’t say that.

                “I’m asking a lot.” Sasha _hated_ asking favors, but if he had ever needed one, now was the time.

                “If you want me to try to acquit you for first degree murder, I won’t do it.”

                Rolling his eyes at this, he finally just asked, “Can I live with you?”

                “For how long?” Klemens didn’t know what he was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t Sasha, whom he hadn’t genuinely touched base with since last September, to ask him to live with him. Well, although the house that he owned was small at best, it did get lonely sometimes, and it certainly had space for two people, if not more. And anyway, despite the reservations that Klemens might have had about letting Sasha live with him, he was accountable for whatever Sasha said that he needed from him.

                Sasha kept on making direct eye contact with Klemens. “Indefinitely,” he said. “Maybe until I’m twenty-five.” He didn’t know what he would do once he turned twenty-five, but that date seemed so far away right now that it didn’t particularly matter to him.

                “And…” mumbled Klemens, trying to find the right words to say. “Wait, what happened to you living with…?” And then it dawned on him. _Oh_. “Did you…”

                “Last night we broke up,” Sasha answered without the slightest bit of hesitation or emotion. At this point, it was just fact. “We’re not together anymore.”

                “But why?”

                “I don’t have to tell you _anything_ about my relationship with him.”

                “Well, that’s fair enough, I suppose. And I know I said I would do anything for you, but if you stay here that long, you have to pay rent.”

                “That’s perfectly alright.”

                “Do you still work at that coffee place?”

                “I’m supposed to be there right now. I agreed to pay one of my coworkers twice my wages if he covered for me today.”

                The two continued to talk and catch up on the past nine months of each other’s lives. They spent a few hours just _talking_ and nothing else until Klemens finally took one of Sasha’s hands in his own and kissed it softly.

                “Do you remember,” he began, “when you said that you wanted to get married? That you wanted you wanted to be my husband? Do you still feel that way?”

                Sasha blushed, for those were deeply embarrassing memories for him. “I think that I’ve changed a lot since I said that. I think I’ve figured myself out more. And I never thanked you for letting me cry on your shoulder.”

                “You don’t have to thank me for anything, and although I would prefer it if you did, you don’t have to tell me anything about your relationship with Leo, either.”

                Sighing, he said, “I’ll tell you what happened, okay?”

                “Only if you really want to.”

                “I told Leo that I couldn’t be happy with him because I can’t stop thinking about everything I’ve done to wrong him.” Well, that was the quick and dirty version of it. “Well, if I’m going to live here, then I have to go get my things from his apartment, but he told me not to go whenever _he’ll_ be there for two weeks.”

                Klemens changed the subject. “Sasha, I have something important to tell you as well.”

                “Yeah?”

                “You know how I’m married, right?” He twisted his wedding ring around and around his ring finger.

                “How could I _possibly_ forget?”

                “Well…” he started, but decided to stop there. It was nothing that Sasha needed to know about. He wasn’t just about to drop another nuclear bomb on their relationship. “You know, never mind. It’s nothing that you need to know.”

\---

                It was, in a word, _awkward_ for Klemens and Sasha to live together at first. Part of this was because Klemens didn’t know how Sasha felt about him anymore, and another part of this was because Sasha didn’t know how he felt about Klemens anymore either. But whatever it was, it was weaker than love but stronger than amity, and for this reason, Sasha continued to keep some distance from Klemens.

                Because everything had changed so much, there were no longer constant proclamations of love as there had been before. There wasn’t a considerable amount of physical contact, other than the somewhat-common occasions in which Klemens kissed Sasha’s cheek or his hand. They had long and meaningful conversations whenever they were together, and although neither of them understood, it was an entirely different but equally wonderful type of love as they had shared before.

                As the days passed, Sasha continued to devote a considerable amount of time to thinking about Leo; he missed him. He missed him as he had never missed anyone before, because in his heart he still thought that one day he would walk through the door to their apartment, and Leo and Caroline would both be there bickering about some stupid matter that they would both forget in about five minutes, and they would have a nice dinner with a nice conversation and probably more bickering. Because in his heart he knew that the place he shared with Leo was the only place that he had every truly thought of as home. Because in his heart he knew that he would never have that same type of love ever again, and he only had himself to blame. And yet, he hadn’t felt any debilitating depressive episodes since he and Leo had separated, and this seemed a good omen for the rest of his life.

                Every day he went back to the apartment when he knew that Leo would be gone in order to collect more and more of his things, however, and it still felt like home, but a perverse version of it. Everything was barren, and everything was quiet. He sometimes walked around just to see how it looked different without him; everything, as was expected of Leo, was immaculate; it didn’t look as if anyone lived here anymore; some of the bookshelves were beginning to collect dust. Sasha began to feel as if Leo wasn’t truly living in this apartment anymore, but as if he was rotting away in a prison of loneliness and nostalgia for what had fallen apart yet again.

                One day, as he was leaving the apartment with two more armfuls of stuff, he decided to see if Arthur was home. He knocked on the door, but went back to Klemens’s apartment when no one answered the door.

                “Klemens,” he said as the two of them were on a walk exactly a week after he had broken up with Leo. He was holding Klemens’s hand in his own and held it a bit more tightly as he spoke.

                “Yeah?”

                “What’s the important thing that you were going to tell me a week ago?”

                “Oh,” breathed Klemens. He supposed that now would be a good time to tell Sasha, because he would find out eventually anyway. “There are two things, actually.”

                “Tell me both.”

                He paused for a moment as they continued to saunter along. “The first is that I talked with Maria a while ago.”

                “Maria?” Sasha asked, slightly confused.

                Klemens nodded, realizing that Sasha was unfamiliar with whom he referred to as Maria. “Maria Eleonore, my wife?”

                “Oh.”

                “Well, she’s never coming to live in Canada with me. She wants to stay in Austria. So when she said that, I decided to stop lying and I told her that I had fallen in love with another man, and she was hurt, but after we talked about it for a long while over a series of weeks, I think that she’s okay with it. Everything between us, at this point, is perfectly alright.”

                “And what’s the other thing?” Sasha sighed. He supposed that if Maria Eleonore _knew_ about this and consented, then they _were_ perfectly alright for now.

                Klemens squeezed Sasha’s hand harder. “That’s the other thing, Sasha,” he said apologetically, “My daughter is going to be born in August. I just wanted you to know…”

                “And… did you tell your wife that you’re in love with me before or after she got pregnant?”

                “We worked everything out before.”

                “Okay.” Sasha hesitated between each word. “Then I suppose it’s all…”

                “Alright.”

                He nodded and smiled, although his smile contained a deep sense of melancholy that it was impossible to ignore. Nonetheless, it was a smile. “For the first time,” he said, “everything is all… alright.” And he began to grasp the haziest idea that perhaps he wasn’t a stationary constant whose duty on the earth was to be sad and suffer, that he was a variable who could not control a good part of his own circumstances, but had freedom to change as he wanted within the preexisting restraints.

                In the time it had taken him to realize this, everyone else had remained more or less the same, and perhaps he had, too, but so much of him had changed in such nuanced ways that sometimes he couldn’t recognize himself, and he almost liked it sometime. It had taken his own suffering to come to this epiphany, but even more than his own, it had taken others’. Pain and suffering was not a point or a line, but rather, a sea of converging rivers which flowed one way and then the next, now ebbing and now flowing.

                ‘ _It’s one step forward and one step back,’_ he thought to himself, ‘ _but over time, things do get better. It took losing the man that I loved more than I could have ever loved myself, but strangely enough, maybe things are getting better. It doesn’t make sense, but I suppose that nothing does.’_

                “You’ve been really quiet for a long time,” Klemens said to him after a while. He finally looked up, and when he did, he saw that it wouldn’t be long before the sun was on the horizon again.

                And he whispered, “ _Everything is different now_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> discussion question: do you think it was okay for Sasha to just tell Leo that he cheated on him without giving any regard to Leo's feelings?
> 
> Please comment thanks ;)


	24. the aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey,” replied Leo gloomily, casting his eyes towards the ground. “Why don’t you come in, and then we can drink coffee… or whatever?” He spoke with the tone of someone who had been questioning their motive to live. His face looked as if he had hardly eaten anything in the past two weeks, which, knowing Leo, was probably the case.

                Sasha knocked lightly on Leo’s door. It had officially been two weeks since they had broken up, and to his own surprise, he wasn’t particularly broken up about it. He had been living with Klemens for the past two weeks and planned to continue to do so until the end of the year. Although he wished that his life was going differently right now, at the same time, he was happier than he had been before.

                It took about thirty seconds for Leo to open the door, because Sasha had finally broken his longstanding habit of just showing at people’s front doors whenever he pleased and had talked to Leo about it for a bit before he actually came. He thought that whatever he wanted to say would have come naturally to him, but when he finally stood face-to-face with Leo for the first time in these two weeks, he still didn’t have the right words and couldn’t think of any that might have been appropriate.

                “…Hey,” he finally said to Leo with a grimace. It was still early in the morning, and his mind wasn’t functioning properly yet.

                “Hey,” replied Leo gloomily, casting his eyes towards the ground. “Why don’t you come in, and then we can drink coffee… or whatever?” He spoke with the tone of someone who had been questioning their motive to live. His face looked as if he had hardly eaten anything in the past two weeks, which, knowing Leo, was probably the case.

                “Okay,” said Sasha, and they settled down with coffee in the living room area where they had fought just two weeks ago, but now seemed to alien to both of them. He still didn’t know what to say, but if he didn’t say anything now, then he knew that he never would.

                “Leo…” he began hesitantly. “I know that _sorry_ won’t cut it, but I’m sorry.”

                Leo looked directly at Sasha. Instead of with sadness and gloom, this time he spoke with a hint of anger in his voice and in his usually-soft eyes. “Sasha, why are you here?” He regretted asking Sasha to come here so much.

                “I’m here because I wanted to see you! Because I wanted to talk to you! Because I wanted to apologize.”

                “But you know that I won’t accept your apology no matter what you say, so why are you apologizing?”

                “Because I want you to know how much I regret doing all of this to you.”

                “And why are you doing that?”

                Sasha didn’t know what exactly Leo was getting at, but he remained defensive throughout. “Because it’s important to me.”

                “And,” Leo said sharply, “because it’s about you. You always have to make everything about you.”

                Sasha didn’t _like or ask for_ this sort of verbal abuse, but at this point he sort of knew that he deserved it. “I wanted to just talk to you, Leo. About stuff.”

                “Well, now I know that we don’t have anything to talk about anymore. Everything between us is over.”

                “Do you want me to leave?”

                “Yes, I actually really do. And don’t come back.”

                “Okay.” At this point, it was just better to leave without protest or anything. Sasha stood up and left the apartment without saying anything else. Perhaps Leo would have liked it if he had said something, _anything_ , to give him some sense of closure, but now they were beyond even that. Leo was right; there was nothing to be said anymore.

                Sasha didn’t want to make the thirty-minute journey back to Klemens’s house just yet, so on a whim, he decided to text Arthur on a whim, “ _Arthur, are you home?”_

                Within a few seconds he received the response, “ _Yeah, why?”_

                “ _Open your door_.”

\---

                Arthur and Sasha chatted amicably for a bit before Arthur finally broke and asked him, “Do you remember when we kissed a couple of weeks ago?”

                “How could I possibly forget?”

                “Do you want to do it again?” The question hung in the air for a moment before Sasha finally answered.

                “Yes.” And immediately, Sasha and Arthur stepped closer to each other and kissed again.

                Arthur felt Sasha’s hands tangle themselves in his hair, and he wrapped his own arms around the other man’s torso. He opened his mouth slightly until he felt Sasha’s tongue meet his own, and they continued like this for another few minutes until both of them, their faces bright red, were too breathless to kiss anymore.

                “Arthur...” mumbled Sasha in between long inhales and exhales, “is it bad that I actually want to do this with you?”

                Looking away for a moment, Arthur quickly answered, “I don’t think it’s a bad thing.” He normally abided by a strict moral code, but when the man whom he had been fantasizing about was in his arms propositioning him, he wasn’t just about to say _no_. When he could normally breathe again, he leaned slightly upwards and continued to make out with Sasha, this time slowly feeling up his torso. Sasha did the same.

                Regardless of how this compared to the countless times that Arthur had imagined getting physical with Sasha, the difference was that all of those other times had been mere fantasies which played and replayed in his mind, and this time he was actually here with Sasha, living out this reality that he never actually imagined would happen. To his surprise, Sasha was actually pretty good at kissing, but this made him think that if the only two people he had ever really been with were Leo and Klemens, which meant that he probably kissed like Leo and Klemens kissed, and this thought alone made him stop, take a step back from Sasha, and shake his head.

                “I’m sorry, Sasha…” he mumbled. “We can’t do this. At least, not right now.”

\---

                It was evening before Sasha finally returned to Klemens’s house, mentally groaning about how he had to go to work tomorrow. ‘ _Only six more months,’_ he thought, ‘ _six more months and then everything will be alright again.’_ He tried as hard as he possibly could to distract himself with menial issues in order to forget that he had just actually hookup up with Arthur. Well, he supposed, Klemens was right about one thing; there was absolutely no way that Arthur was straight.

                It started raining as he walked to Klemens’s small house. At first there was a sprinkle, and as he approached closer and closer, it began to turn into a full-fledged rainstorm. By the time he stepped through the front door, he could already hear loud cracks of thunder in the distance. Perhaps it was cliché, but when he heard the thunder, he was instantly brought back to the memories of the times that he and Leo had spent the evenings with cups of hot tea and blankets because there was a storm outside and Leo, although he hated to admit it, was afraid of thunderstorms. It reminded him of the times that both of them had been outside when it started to rain and they had to run to the nearest shelter to avoid getting too wet. He smiled faintly at these positive memories before it dawned on him for the first time that those were memories that he had to cherish, because they were ones that he would never be able to have again. He finally came to the stern realization that he had lost Leo forever because he was stupid and inexperienced and didn’t think that losing any sort of love would break his heart so thoroughly until it already had.

                He had already cried so much over trivial matters and things that now seemed as if they could have been easily avoided that despite this sudden wave of sadness, he found that he couldn’t cry anymore.

                ‘ _Maybe,’_ he thought, ‘ _I can lie down on Klemens’s driveway until he comes home and then he won’t see me and he’ll run over my body. Maybe I can throw myself off of the nearest highway overpass and I’ll be dead the moment I hit the ground. Maybe if I sit out in the rain long enough, I’ll get sick again, and this time it’ll be fatal.’_

                For the amount that Sasha evidently thought about death and dying, he knew that he was too soft to actually go through with it, so he went to Klemens’s kitchen, poured himself a glass from the mostly-empty bottle of vodka that he always kept around, and sat on the concrete steps of the front porch, contemplating all he had lost. Only this time, Leo wouldn’t be around to tell him that he loved him unconditionally. Caroline wouldn’t be around to tell him that he needed to go therapy. He realized that he hadn’t even thought to say goodbye to Maria before she left the country to go to Saint Petersburg again. Maybe Kostya was right about him all along, and all this time he had been too blind to see that anything he said seldom aligned with anything he meant.

                ‘ _I’m just a wealthy pseudo-alcoholic searching for the lost meaning in life… I swear this reminds me of some character in some novel, but I can’t remember what…”_ he looked at the gloomy sky for some sort of sign of anything, really, but all it did was rain. ‘ _Just keep on raining… rain is fine.’_

                He sat like that for some hours, watching the cars go by in the rain and occasionally going back inside to refill his glass of vodka, until he saw Klemens’s car pull up in his driveway. Klemens parked in the driveway, pulled out his umbrella, and walked over to the soaking wet Sasha.

                “Sasha, how long have you been here like this? You’re soaking wet.” He then noticed the glass sitting behind Sasha where no rainwater could have gotten into it. “And I _really_ hope that’s water.”

                Sasha, who was somewhat tipsy at this point, said, “It’s not water.”

                “You’re going to get sick, like the last time we were out in the rain...”

                “I’m not going to get sick. I don’t care anymore about myself.”

                Klemens shook his head and took another moment to examine Sasha. He looked tired, and cold, and drunk, and another plethora of adjectives which when combined ultimately pointed to gloominess, and gloominess alone. “Even if you don’t care about yourself, _I_ care about you, okay? And if you care at all about _me_ , you would stop doing this to yourself.” When Sasha said nothing, he continued, “I’ve never been depressed and I don’t know what you’re going through because I’m not you, but you have to at least _try_ to make an effort.”

                “Okay,” mumbled Sasha.

                “And because I’m technically your landlord now, unless you go upstairs and take a warm shower right now and stop binge drinking altogether, I’m evicting you.”

                “Okay.” And with that, Sasha took his glass, went inside, and did what Klemens told him to do.

                Getting back into his car in order to park it inside properly, Klemens sighed, exhausted, and wondered, ‘ _What am I going to do about him? Or better yet, what_ can _I do about him? Egregious.’_

\---

                Meanwhile, Arthur was still spooked over the fact that he had made out with Sasha earlier that day, and he didn’t know how to proceed from there. He didn’t know what had come over him to reject the other man so earnestly, and as he continued to think about it, he realized that it wasn’t so much that he kissed the same way that Leo and Klemens probably kissed, but…

                There was no but. He wished that he had stopped himself from physically engaging with Sasha because he felt that it was _wrong_ to take advantage of his heartbroken state, but had to reconcile himself to the fact that he had just been superficial about the whole affair. After thinking about it for a considerable amount of time, he finally came to a seemingly definitive question.

                ‘ _Do I want to be with him?’_ he asked himself, and clear-cut though his mind and thought process usually were, there was no clear answer.

                ‘ _Maybe… maybe if I never knew him, then I would want to be with him. Maybe I only think of him the way I do because I see him as more of an object than as an actual human being. Maybe, in light of recent events, it’s wrong of me to even be having this mental discussion with myself.’_

                Arthur always knew what he wanted and tried to get it as swiftly as possible, so this method of reasoning was all new to him. Perhaps if he had taken a break to study philosophy or something instead of math and physics, he wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.

                Deciding to try to stop thinking about the whole issue for now, he couldn’t help but spent the rest of the night fighting off the pervading thoughts in his mind which asked him, over and over again, what he wanted and what he would do to get it. That night, just to get away from his apartment and all of the mundane procedures that awaited him within it, he took a walk on the streetlamp-lit sidewalks of his neighborhood and took a moment to appreciate what it was like to live in the moment.

                ‘ _I’m too old to go out in the middle of the night and pretend that time will never move forward from here,’_ he thought, but he did it anyway. When time stood still like this, there were no such things as _problems_ or _memories_. The only movement other than the movement of the light summer wind and the gently rustling was his own. In a stillness such as this, when all of Quebec City was a ghost city that belonged to him and him alone, there were no such things as emotion or love.

                It was kind of nice.

                As time went on like this— whether it moved slowly or quickly, Arthur couldn’t tell— the questions in life faded from glaring red question marks in his mind, and rather, into rosy speculations on his present and what wasn’t his future, but would soon be his present.

                If he got rejected, he decided that he would move on with the rest of his life, because he didn’t like to dwell on things that didn’t matter and weren’t real. The worst thing anyone could do to him at this point was say no.

\---

                And Leo, meanwhile, actually felt far better after he had seen Sasha earlier that day. He talked to Caroline on the phone and told her everything that had happened.

                “ _I’m sorry, Leo,”_ she said, trying as hard as possible to sound as if all of this was a surprise to her. “ _I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you’re going through_.”

                “It happened again. That’s all I can think about. I was cheated on again.” Leo could feel some tears rush into his eyes again, but he hurriedly blinked them away. “I thought Sasha was better than this.”

                “ _It’s not your fault, Napoleone. You didn’t do anything wrong.”_

                “I’m in the exact same place that I was in two Septembers ago, but somehow, I just feel worse. I wish I could just… stop feeling again.” He paused. “You know, I shouldn’t be talking to my teenage sister about this.”

                “ _It’s okay, Napoleone.”_

                “You’re a good sister, Caroline,” he said before he hung up.

                Then, he decided that if he was going to tell his siblings about it, then he might as well tell all of them at the same time. He found Joseph’s number in his cell phone and dialed it. It was very early in the morning back in France, but at least if Joseph saw that Leo had called him, he would know that it was something important and call back when he woke up. When it was time, Leo dialed the extension code for making calls to France, and waited. There were fifteen rings before Joseph finally picked.

                “ _Hello_?” he asked, sounding drowsy. “ _Napoléon? It’s two in the morning_. _Couldn’t you have texted me?_ ”

                Leo was maybe the only person he knew who actually made calls anymore, so he supposed that his brother had a point. “Giuseppe, I have something important to tell you.”

                “ _Are you in the hospital?”_ Joseph paused for a second before asking hesitantly, “ _Is Caroline in the hospital?”_

                “No… I wanted to tell you— I suppose it’s not that important, after all— I broke up with Sasha.”

                “ _But why?”_

                “I found out that a long time ago, he cheated on me. With some German guy.”

                “ _I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”_

                “It happened two weeks ago, so now I’m pretty much fine, I think.” It was a lie, of course, but Leo had never really been one for telling the truth when it came to his feelings.

                “ _Napoléon, I know we’ve had some rough patches in our relationship, but if you need to talk about it, you know I’ll listen to you,”_ said Joseph, even though he knew that Leo would never actually take him up on the offer. He paused again. “ _I sincerely didn’t believe that Sasha would turn out to be a blackguard.”_

                “Never say that sort of thing about him _ever_ again!” Leo snapped.

                This surprised Joseph, because Leo generally seemed to enjoy talking bad about his exes. Nevertheless, he let it go, because from what he could tell, his younger brother genuinely seemed heartbroken. So, he thought, Leo _did_ have feelings after all. “ _Sorry_.”

                “It’s okay.”

                “ _I’ll talk to you later, okay? I don’t want to wake up my wife.”_

                “Talk to you later,” mumbled Leo as he pressed the red button to end the call. In the dim lamplight of the apartment, he could have sworn that he heard Sasha mumble from somewhere, “ _You shouldn’t read in poor light.”_ But Sasha wasn’t there, and even if he made the effort to rekindle their relationship, it would never be the same as it had once been.

                If there was just _something_ he could do to stop thinking about Sasha every other moment, and for a moment to act as if this life had always been his and his alone! If he could just _forget_ for a moment and act as if everything was fine and that it was evening and that Sasha would be home soon, and then they would have dinner and then take a walk, or something of the sort…

                And for the first time in a long time, Leo imagined that his mind was a wooden cabinet and that all the drawers were filled with memories of things and people that he desperately wanted to forget, but was only able to push in the back of his mind for later. He thought of taking all of his sweet, fond memories of Sasha and pushing them one-by-one into a drawer that was already overflowing with all of the other thoughts that plagued him, but that he neither had the time nor the patience to dwell on.

                When he closed that imaginary drawer, he felt, for the first time since the words “ _I cheated on you with Klemens”_ came out of Sasha’s mouth, a hint of relief. As if he could finally breathe again.

                Perhaps, Leo thought, all of his pain over the past two weeks had been his own fault for giving everything he had to the people around him, and never taking the opportunity to dwell on himself and think about what _he_ needed. For the past seven years, after all, he had spent his time constantly taking care of others and tending to others’ feelings, seldom sparing a second thought for himself or to think about what _he_ needed. Now that he knew he wouldn’t be able to love anyone like that a fourth time, he decided that _unless_ by stroke of chance he met someone who could make him _feel_ like that again, he would be more selfish. Yes— that’s what he needed— to be more selfish.

                Letting the cabinet in his mind fade to oblivion again, he took this rare moment of placidness and went to sleep, turning over the same thought again and again in his mind, ignoring that this was the same train of thought that he had followed after he separated from Josephine, and the same one which had led him to his current state in the first place.

                ‘ _Well,_ ’ he thought, ‘ _This is where I am, and this is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life. It’s too late to turn back in another direction— this is my life, this is who I am, and now I know that what I am now is what I’m going to be._ _To be more selfish— yes, that’s exactly what I ought to do— just think of myself and what_ I _need more, rather than expend my mental energy on the people around me. That’s what I need to do. Exactly what I need to do.’_

                Perhaps he had finally come to a conclusion about who he was, where he was from, and where he was going to stay, but that was why, as far as anyone could recall, Leo never changed at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! this is the second-to last chapter!
> 
> please comment!


	25. The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A month passed, and Sasha and Klemens were alone in Klemens’s kitchen. Sasha was teaching him how to properly bake his own bread. It was late afternoon, and Klemens had invited Arthur over that evening for dinner and merrymaking. Although Sasha was slightly uncomfortable with this, he didn’t vocally object, and the plans were set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :0

                A month passed, and Sasha and Klemens were alone in Klemens’s kitchen. Sasha was teaching him how to properly bake his own bread. It was late afternoon, and Klemens had invited Arthur over that evening for dinner and merrymaking. Although Sasha was slightly uncomfortable with this, he didn’t vocally object, and the plans were set.

                Sasha watched as Klemens kneaded the dough on the flour-covered countertop which he had meticulously cleaned prior to this endeavor. From the look on his face, it was evident that Klemens wasn’t enjoying this at all. Alexander der Große, Klemens’s cat, strolled lazily from one entrance to the kitchen to the next, and both of them watched as he slinked along the kitchen floor. Klemens _really_ didn’t like it when Alexander came into the kitchen for any reason, which was good because he rarely ever did, but when this happened, he took a break from grinding his knuckled into the soft bread dough and grimaced.

                “I just cleaned that…” he sighed unhappily.

                Sasha almost smiled at Klemens’s petty desperation. “I still can’t believe that you named your cat after me.” This was one of his favorite ways to get on Klemens’s nerves.

                “I don’t know how many times I have to explain to you that you’re _not_ Alexander the great.”

                “Well, my name in German would be Alexander, and I’m pretty great, so I don’t think that’s a valid point.”

                Klemens gave Sasha a good-natured glare. “We’re not having this discussion a seventh time. I didn’t name him after you. And that’s _final._ ”

                “Okay, if you say so.” Despite Klemens’s fervent protests to the notion, Sasha still thought that Alexander der Große was at least partially named after him.

                The two remained silent for some time as Klemens continued to knead, until Sasha broke the silence again with a slightly more serious subject matter. He said, “So, I met and talked to Leo today.”

                Turning around to look at Sasha, Klemens asked, “You mean your ex?”

                “That’s the only Leo I know, so yes.”

                “And?”

                “I’m going to see him again next week.”

                “Do you think he wants to get back together with you?”

                Sasha shook his head. “No,” he replied. “Definitely not. I think that both of us just miss each other. I think that he’s trying to stop thinking of me as his ex-lover.”

                “That almost makes me sad. Almost.”

                “That’s the sort of thing that would have made me sad before I actually lived through it. Now I know that that’s just life. You can stop kneading, by the way.”

                “Thank _god_.” Klemens rounded the dough up into a ball, put it in the bread tin, and spread it around the pan while Sasha set the oven to preheat. He turned around and kissed Sasha, whose hands left flour on his shirt. Whatever. He had more than one shirt, anyway. “Did you happen to see Arthur while you were there?” he asked as he washed his hands.

                “No, I didn’t meet him as his apartment. And even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see Arthur afterwards.” Sasha had picked up the terrible habit of making out with Arthur whenever he saw him, and then avoiding him for as long as he possibly could. He hadn’t told Klemens at this point that he had a weird thing with Arthur, and while he didn’t _want_ to keep it a secret, per se, he just never found the right time to work it into conversation.

                “Okay. Well, in any case, I think that you should stop seeing your ex. Just in general. Period.”

                “I think that you should stop telling me what to do.”

                “I’m not telling you what to do,” Klemens shrugged, “Just a suggestion.”

                “Well, to be quite frank, I don’t like when you suggest what I should do with my life.”

                Klemens took Sasha’s flour-free left hand in his own and kissed it tenderly. “Well, if you follow my advice or don’t, that’s up to you.”

                Sasha never quite understood Klemens’s obsession with hand-kissing, but nevertheless, he quite likes it when Klemens kissed his hand, which was often. “Thank you, Klemens, I suppose.’

                “You have nothing to thank me for,” Klemens said quietly.

\---

                It was Sasha who opened the door when it he heard the doorbell ring that evening. He hadn’t seen Arthur in a while— although, having lived next to him so long, going even three days without seeing him felt like a long time.

                Arthur’s initial reaction to seeing Sasha was a split second of shock, followed by his cheeks becoming enveloped in a faint blush. “Hey, Sasha,” he said.

                Sasha had so much power over him. Seeing Arthur, who was probably one of the most grown-up people he knew, become flustered like this… it was certainly a spectacle. “Hey, Arthur,” replied Sasha casually. “Do you want to come in?”

                “Yeah, I really do want to come in.”

                A moment, Klemens came out to greet Arthur. “Arthur!” he exclaimed. “What a surprise to see you!”

                “You invited me here,” stated Arthur.

                “So I did. What of it?”

                Every time that Sasha had seen Klemens and Arthur interact with each other, their rapport always seemed so deeply affected to him that he often wondered how they were even friends. In fact, he wondered whether they even shared a sense of camaraderie or whether they were just used to being around each other at this point. Probably some of both.

                And watching them interact, Sasha realized that perhaps the reason that Klemens and Arthur continued to cling together even under their blatant air of artifice towards each other was the same reason that he continued to spend time with Leo despite the pain that they caused each other. It was the same reason for the way that Leo and Josephine had acted around each other the one time they accidentally met in the bar that one time.

                No. It _couldn’t_ be that Arthur and Klemens used to have feelings for each other, but once the thought entered Sasha’s mind for the first time, everything seemed so much clearer to him than it had been before, and his thoughts became linear. He decided that he wasn’t just going a coward anymore; he decided that he wouldn’t let his personal feelings interfere with the truth which laid themselves out in front of him anymore. He cared too much about Arthur and Klemens to let himself stand in the way of a possible reparation with their odd relationship. And he didn’t have the mental stability to let himself be hurt again or to hurt anyone else with his actions.

                ‘ _I can’t keep on doing whatever I’m doing with Arthur,’_ he decided, ‘ _and I have to let go of Leo. And he has to let go of me.’_

                Sasha snapped back into reality when Klemens said to him, “You know, Sasha, you’ve been quiet for a while, now.”

                “Well, you know, I don’t really talk much.” He paused, taking time to look over both Klemens and Arthur. “You know,” he said sheepishly, “I apologize, but I just remembered something important that I have to go do.”

                Klemens raised an eyebrow. “Right _now?”_ he asked, suspicious.

                “Immediately.” With that word, Sasha quickly left the scene, making sure that he had his wallet, keys, and cell phone on him. He didn’t know how long he would be gone, but he didn’t bother wasting any time to say goodbye.

\---

                Half an hour later, Sasha ran into Leo just as he was leaving his apartment. Leo didn’t look surprised to see Sasha, but he stared at him half in contempt and half in curiosity of what Sasha had come all the way here, unannounced, to say to him.

                “Leo,” said Sasha.

                “Oh, hello, Sasha,” replied Leo, stopping in his tracks. Even though he was so much shorter than Sasha, the way he carried himself made Sasha feel as if he was looking down upon him. He began to understand why everyone, even those who didn’t know him very well, thought that Leo was full of himself. “What are you doing here?”

                “I wanted to talk with you.”

                “Okay,” Leo said. “Whatever you want to say, say it.”

                They were still standing in the middle of the hallway, and it made Sasha slightly uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he said what he wanted to say, because Leo wasn’t about to move a single inch from where he was standing. “We’ve spent the last three years of our lives together, but I think that we have to stop seeing each other. Forever.”

                Sasha continued, “I mean, Leo, you can act like we were never together to begin with, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was bad to you. We have to let go of each other.”

                Leo exhaled deeply and took a more casual stance than he had been before. “Look,” he sighed. “Sasha, you’re the one who approached _me_. Don’t blame me for not letting go of you, because you’re the one who can’t let go of me. Because you still want to pretend that you didn’t do anything wrong. And when you do that, and show up unannounced, sometimes it’s easier to pretend that the past two years of my life never happened. You’ve already wronged me enough as it is. Just stop projecting your own problems onto me.”

                “And… that’s what happens when people can’t let go of each other, no matter what. They act artificial around each other. Like… you and me. Like you and Josephine.”

                “I don’t want that for us,” said Leo. “Right now I am very resentful towards you, and I don’t want to hide that, but it’s something that I can’t deal with as long as I’m still with you.”

                “And maybe one day, in a few months or years,” Leo continued, “one of us will get drunk and text the other person and we’ll tearfully reunite for a few moments. Or we’ll meet again in public and we’ll have a genuine conversation, but it’ll still be a little bit awkward because I won’t have forgiven you. But until then, I want you to get out of my life.”

                “Okay,” nodded Sasha, “I’m actually glad we had this talk. So I’ll see you again… in a few months, or years.”

                Leo kept on walking, leaving Sasha behind him. “Goodbye, Sasha,” he said without turning around.

                “Adieu.”

\---

                When Sasha returned to Klemens’s house, it was already dark, but Klemens and Arthur, presumably already having eaten dinner, were once again immersed in some tedious conversation in Klemens’s living room by the cold fireplace.

                “Hey, Sasha…” Klemens called as he heard the _click_ of the lock and the door opening.

                “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” Sasha called back. He could tell from the way that Klemens pronounced his name. Klemens’s accent always slipped into his words when he was drunk, and subsequently, he always pronounced Sasha’s name the German way.

                “Maybe a little bit…”

                When Sasha walked to where Klemens was, however, it was evident that he was far more drunk than he would have liked to admit. Sasha always bought alcohol for the households these days, and the kind he liked to buy was definitely more concentrated than whatever Klemens was used to.

                Arthur looked at Sasha. “He’s very drunk,” he said. “I, on the other hand, am completely sober.”

                “How did _that_ happen?”

                “I have to go out of town tomorrow morning, so I’ve just been drinking water this whole time.”

                “My god…” said Klemens loudly, “I’m going to be so hungover at work tomorrow… … …”

                _“Maybe the reason that lawyers are so anal all the time is because they’re all hungover_ ,” Arthur muttered.

                “I heard that, you know.”

                Sasha wanted to say that Leo would have _really_ enjoyed Arthur’s comment, but he dismissed the idea. “Klemens, I’m carrying you to your bed upstairs.” Klemens didn’t say anything, which Sasha assumed meant that he wanted to be carried upstairs. He could walk, of course, but if Sasha was offering to carry him, then he wasn’t about to decline.

                “Wait, are you sure that you can—” Arthur started, but it was too late. Sasha had swiftly picked up Klemens bridal-style and was carrying him towards the staircase. He didn’t think that he was strong enough to carry Klemens all that distance, but evidently, he was incorrect.

                A few minutes later, Sasha returned, this time holding Alexander der Große in his arms. Setting the cat down, he told Arthur, “Arthur, we need to have a talk.”

                “I think that a talk would be in order.”

                “Well,” Sasha exhaled. “We can keep this short. I really like you but I won’t date you. For now.” He added the _for now_ because he felt that although he was rejecting Arthur now, this wasn’t the end for them; now, more than ever, it was evident that they had some sort of connection which surpassed friendship but stopped somewhere short of romance.

                “Can’t or won’t?”

                “Won’t. Will not.”

                Arthur nodded. “I understand. One day, though.”

                This was far easier than Sasha thought it would be. “Maybe soon. Maybe later. Maybe never. Just not now.”

                “And Klemens?”

                “I really love him,” said Sasha, smiling faintly at the fantasy of being able to have an actual relationship with Klemens. “But you know. He’s married. And is going to have daughter in August. Which ruins everything.”

                “It really does, doesn’t it?”

                “I wish we knew each other better, Arthur.”

                “I’m glad we don’t.”

                “What do you mean?”

                “You’re too young and impressionable,” Arthur pointed out. “You fall in love too easily. I don’t want either of us to feel that way for each other.”

                Sasha was silent for a moment. “People… everyone keeps on telling me that I’m so _young_ and that I have so much _time_ left to do whatever, but Arthur, I don’t think I’m that young. Or at least, I don’t feel that way. I just feel like anyone else, that I’m running out of time just as fast as everyone else, or even faster. I feel as if I’m wasting my time, but I don’t know what else to do. It’s all insufferable. It’s all just suffering.” He remembered the conversation that he had had on the train with Leo the day his life went to utter shit, the conversation in which they had imagined themselves as characters from _the Sufferings of Young Werther_ and _War and Peace_. Now, Sasha didn’t feel as if he had the privilege of thinking of himself as a character from a romantic novel anymore, and he also realized that in the boxes of things that he had retrieved from Leo’s apartment in the two weeks after they initially broke up, he had never managed to find either of his copies of the novels. “The sufferings of young Sasha, indeed…” he mumbled bitterly. “The sufferings of Sasha Pavlovitch.”

                “Sasha, when I was your age, six years ago,” Arthur thought back to what he was doing six years ago. “I was finishing my master’s in physics. But we’re completely different people. And whatever you’re doing now, if you’re fine with it, then you shouldn’t keep on worrying about not doing enough.” He spoke as if he was some sort of sage even though he himself had barely figured out what his own life meant to himself.

                “I suppose that I just want to have more obligations to people without actually wanting to do anything for them. Sometimes I wish that more people needed me, but really there’s nothing to need.”

                Putting a hand on Sasha’s shoulder, Arthur told him in a soothing voice, “If you want to think that. Whatever you want to make of it.” He checked his watch. “Sasha, it’s getting pretty late, so I should drive home.”

                “What time is it?”

                “It’s eleven already.”

                “That’s not _that_ late,” insisted Sasha. “You could stay longer.”

                “I actually like listening to you talk, but I can’t.” Both of them stood up.

                “Can’t or won’t?”

                “Some of both.”

                “Alright, then. Let me walk you to the door.” They went to the door, and Arthur swiftly put on his shoes before opening the front door.

                “I’ll see you after I get back from Montréal, Sasha,” he said.

                “I’ll see you soon.”

                And then Arthur was gone. Sasha locked the front door behind him and stopped to pet the sleeping Alexander der Große for a few minutes before he turned off all of the downstairs lights and went upstairs to prepare to sleep. When he was done and had put on his pajamas (which were, in the summer, effectively just a pair of shorts), he went to Klemens’s bedroom. Although he tried to open the door quietly, the door creaked loudly and woke Klemens up.

                “ _Z… Sasha?”_ he mumbled.

                “It’s me. Just wanted to make sure that you were doing okay.”

                “Oh, I’m fine… Fine.”

                “Okay. Goodnight, Klemens.”

                Klemens moved his arm behind him and towards the door, as if he was grasping at something. “Sasha, wait, wait…”

                “Yeah?” Sasha’s hand was on the doorknob, but he didn’t move.

                “Can you sleep here? With me?”

                “But why?”

                “Because…” He didn’t know what reason to give. “Because I have legal authority and will sue you if you don’t?”

                Sasha laughed. Sometimes he liked drunk, perpetually-confused Klemens more than he liked rational, sober Klemens. He smiled in the dark. “Okay,” he said, “but I’m not wearing a shirt.”

                “I don’t… care…”

                When Sasha climbed into the warm bed with Klemens, he pulled the drunk man closer to him and just held him in his arms, feeling the way he breathed.

                “Sasha, will you kiss me?” mumbled Klemens, and Sasha kissed him gently on the back of his neck. “Again?”

                And Sasha did it again. He never realized before now how much he had missed being this close to another person. “I love you, Klemens. I’m all yours.”

                “...love you…” but by the end of saying it, Klemens was fast asleep again.

                Perhaps, Sasha thought, Klemens _did_ love him more than anyone else had ever loved him. Despite the fact that it was inconvenient for him. Despite the long period of time that Sasha had wanted nothing to do with him. And feeling him breathe now, the love that had long laid dormant in Sasha swelled again until there was certainly more of it than there had originally been.

                It was different than it was before, of course; before, whenever they met, Sasha felt a core of hot passion inside him for the other man, always wanting to impress him and prove that he, Alexandre Pavlovitch Romanov, was worth loving; now, however, just seeing Klemens’s face or thinking of him was enough to calm him down and give him relief with the mere notion of their love.

                None of this was the best for either of them; in their relationship to date, they had gone through so much and evolved both as individuals and together, but something united them which was stronger than the artificial infatuation and endearment which came about from drinking tea together in an arbitrary effort to kindle some friendship which never should have existed to begin with. None of this had happened for a reason— it had happened because in some odd stroke of fate, determined by innumerable actions from both themselves and from others which weaved together in such an intricate way that no one could possibly comprehend what they all meant, that their lives had overlapped at some crude point of tangency and intersected for the first time.

                Thinking about these metaphysical dealings which were larger than himself, larger than Klemens, larger than Quebec City itself, Sasha finally understood that nothing— love, suffering, beauty, pain and who benefitted from it— was as evident as he had thought it was ever since he first began to consider that there existed constructs and notions infinitely grander than he would ever be. And he finally understood that if a greater purpose for all of this existed, it was far beyond his own sense of reason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been a RIDE which I have been working on since August and although I'm kind of melancholy that it's over, at the same time, I'm excited to work on something new again.  
> I feel that SOSP had far fewer loose ends than IP (my previous fic), although there are some. It's easily the longest thing I've ever written and i like to THINK that it's good to some extent. Overall, though, I feel WAY more confident about it and my writing skills as a whole.  
> I will probably start publishing a new work in mid-August, because I've started one about the Gilded Age which I'm actually excited for and which I hope will turn out well!!!
> 
> Thank you for reading <3 I really really REALLY appreciate the small number of people who have actually taken the time to read over 100,000 words of my writing <3
> 
> and, as always, please comment because they really make my entire day if not my week.

**Author's Note:**

> it gets better  
> shoutout to [vlad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skulduggery_putin)  
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ussbrandywine)  
> Comments are ALWAYS appreciated and make my entire week.


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